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

[Rawalanche]

@amoser

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

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.

I understand the claims you are making, but you still don’t understand a crucial difference between complicated solutions which are justified, and those which are not. I never claimed I am going into UE4 with the expectation to replace a path tracer with it. I do understand difference between realtime rasterizers and offline path tracers. But there’s GIANT difference between technical limitations of the technology and usability deficiencies.

Many of the “weird workarounds, hacky solutions, and approximations” as you put it are necessary since many of the effects just can’t be otherwise achieved with realtime rasterizers, but things like tinted glass is not one of them. A simple additional shading mode, or ability to use two existing shading modes together is completely realistic and there are quite a few other rasterizers out there that show it’s easily possible.

I am talking specifically about a class of usability issues which are not a consequence of underlying technical limitations and yet come at a significant cost in terms of artists’ time.

To put it bluntly, way too many times I’ve heard the something along the lines “It’s complicated because this is a realtime renderer excuse”. My point is that it does not always apply. There are many cases which are as simple as usability design flaws, rather than products of technical limitations. Or in other cases, perhaps products of technical limitations which have been resolved for sometimes up to a decade now.