UE 5.6 - Substrate Transparency not working. Colors not updating in Material Editor

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1

I just uninstalled and installed UE 5.6 from scratch to make sure there were no leftovers from the preview Version.

So I enabled Substrate in the Project

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and followed all kinds of Tutorials & the Documentation about creating Glas with Substrate.

  • Change Material from Opaque to TranslucentColoredTransmittance (or any other Translucency Mode)
  • Enable IOR
  • Add a Substrate Slab BSDF Node and connect it to Front Material
  • Add a Substrate Transmittance-to-MeanFreePath Node and connect it with SSS MFP (that should, according to the tutorials, already create a transparent look)
  • Add a color going into TransmittanceColor

However… Substrate won´t display any nice transparency with the Substrate Flab Approach.

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No matter what translucency rendering mode I try, no luck whatsoever.

Also, the colors are not updated in the constant3vector nodes

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So I am out of ideas. Can anyone reproduce that OR give me a hint how to make it work?

I followed those tutorials for example, but they all show the same approach anyway:

1 Like
2

Same problems here. Seems to be a bug.

3

When setting up your transparent material with the Substrate Transmittance to Mean Free Path node to drive the glass color, make sure the slab node has this setting. This made everything work for me in 5.6 with ray traced refractions in Substrate.

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7 Likes
5

If it doesn’t work, please regenerate the Substrate Transmittance to Mean Free Path node.

6

Guys, are you having the same problem with nodes previews not showing up in the material? All nodes previews are just black for me

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7

That fixed it for me! thank you! how did you figuere this out???

8

I spent almost a whole evening cooped up in a hotel room just pouring through everything, trying everything, comparing 5.5 substrate to 5.6 substrate, and finally noticed that option in there. When there’s no updated documentation you gotta brute force figure it out sometimes lol.

9

Thanks a lot!!!