Hey Everyone,
I am currently trying to work with USD files to import and render an entire stage in UE5. However, I am having an issue with all of my translucent plant meshes not casting shadows onto themselves, or the environment.
The UE5 USD plugin only has 2 parent materials that it’s using to construct all material instances, the USDPreviewSurface, and the USDPreviewSurface Translucent (which is an instance of the first, just with the translucent override turned on). All of the opaque materials are importing perfectly fine. The translucent materials, however, appear to not interact with the lighting at all. Is this a known problem in UE5, or is there a setting I should be checking on in the Project Settings to make translucent objects cast shadows.
As an alternative, I should be able to edit the engine content, and make another parent for Masked materials. Would there be a way to tell the engine to use that as the parent for some USD prims, but not all?
I am currently using Blender to author my USD assets. However if there’s a better workflow using Maya, I’d be happy to switch.
Thanks!
Sean