UE4 still does not have any proper way to do tinted glass

[amoser]

@Rawalanche

The rudimentary script which would be created to create tint material geometry for static meshes would hardly work for simulated fluid caches. Anyone with any DCC familiarity would know that. So it would require some elaborate monstrosity which would cover also a case of animated mesh with dynamic topology. Those are usually heavy so it’s also hardly something you want to be playing back and keeping in memory twice.

No. I’ve done it on multiple occasions and it works fine. Let me know if my posting a video would change your mind.

@Rawalanche

I think the main disagreement we have is that you underestimate the importance of having a **complete **basic PBR shading model. Sure there are many more issues that need to be tackled, but it’s really hard to even build on a broken base. In production environments, it’s just very difficult to employ any kind of shading model which does not cover even as common use case as a tinted translucency/refraction.

I’ve been working as offline 3D generalist for about 11 years now, so I’d say I have a good basis for comparison, and quiet a few of my colleagues have tinkered with realtime workflows too, but the consensus is pretty much the same - the main issue being simple stuff requiring ridiculous, time expensive workarounds to achieve. I’ve eventually managed to bite the bullet, and transitioned career into something you could call UE4 technical artist, but most of my colleagues just were not wanting to put up with that. Even I, myself am still spending way more time in UE to ultimately achieve inferior quality, but hey, it pays better

See, this is what I mean about not communicating. You still seem to be responding to a claim that I have noted from the beginning that I am not actually making. You will find no disagreement from me that there are many caveats associated with using Unreal as a substitute for an offline renderer. Yes, doing this absolutely requires weird workarounds, hacky solutions, and approximations. If I thought otherwise, I promise I would have said so earlier.

In fact, I have been and am saying something very near to the opposite of that: that there are so many obstacles to using Unreal as a complete replacement for an unbiased path tracer, many of which cannot be surmounted *even with *workarounds, that the fact that there is a usable solution *at all *to the particular problem of tinted glass means it’s probably not at the top of the list of things that need to be addressed.

Even more specifically, I was merely pointing out that several of the particular claims you made regarding the approach linked to by MostHost LA were factually inaccurate.