Hello!
I created a lampion model, which I want to look like this:
I get a weird glitch on the lampion where the surface is nice at a certain medium distance but the front layer kind of disappears and gives the color to the metal frame inside when the camera is very close and very far from the object.
Also I want to ask for a solution to a transparent material leaving zero shadows no matter the opacity amount.
Model is done in Autodesk Maya and textures and added in Adobe Substance Painter 3D with no transparency in any of them. In Unreal I succesfully imported FBX with geometry and created materials with textures exported from Substance.
Then I tried making the paper slightly translucent and added a point light source inside the lampion.
These are my material settings:
I am very new in Unreal Engine and visualization in general, but searched a lot about this issue, sorry if its really obvious and easy to find, and thank you for your help!
Addition:
I have suspicion the geometry might be causing the issue as the basic unreal sphere with the same material and a cube inside seems to work alright.
The lampion`s seethrough paper is built with 2 surfaces facing opposite sides (exterior faces the exterior and interior faces the interior)
I would approach that differently, if I had to build that lampion. You do not actually look through the lampion paper. The “see through” is an illusion done by the light inside. The thinner parts are more lit. The metal parts are almost not lit at all.
I would look at that as a sphere with a material. You could do everything in the material’s emissive. Make a mask where everthing that is lit from the inside gets more or less imissive, depending of the paper thickness or if there is metal behind. The metal won’t get emissive so it stays dark and the paper gets “striped” emissive with a bit of noise.
That would look probably more real than trying to actually reproduce reality. Hope that makes sense. You can also do the textures black and white and tint them, or use hue to change the color. That would give you lots of ways to create different looking lanterns just by changing the material with parameters.
Thanks, I like that idea, although from my understanding it would be difficult to then make the holes on top and bottom visible through?
My goal is doing achitectural visualization, so I am going for most realism I can. I worry about that part a little. Of course one can try to make those holes not visible at all then, but thats another topic.
I might try your idea actually