Why material is visible though itself?

[petrow1tch]

Hi, complete noob here. Imported custom model from blender with custom drawn textures. Model is a lowpoly tree with branches made of planes with texture covering both sides. After importing it in UE i had a problem of texture being visible only from one side, but then i found “two sided” checkbox in material settings, and that was solved. But now i can see the planes with this material in front of other planes, and branches that use this same material show up in front of each other like this:

and here’s how similar angle looked in blender:

What exactly could have gone wrong, and how do i fix it? I don’t want to see my branches through other branches. I use UE 4.27 for more context.

[BananableOffense]

Its a sorting issue, in other words the engine doesn’t know which triangles to draw on top, because translucent materials don’t normally output a per pixel depth. Generally you do not want to use translucent materials stacked on top of each-other. It is extremely bad for performance, and causes this issue. The best option is to not use translucency, but if you absolutely must, here are some options:

Translucency sorting issues on complex objects.

If you’re using UE5.1, enable Order Independent Transparency in the project settings. It will add a few instructions to the shader but, as far I saw, solved all sorting issues. Other versions of unreal you can check the “Sort Triangles” option on a per mesh basis and get pretty good results. You can fake transparency with environment mapping - an all time favorite of cheap real time VFX (you see it even in AAA next gen titles) but doesn’t look as convincing with crystal clear glass. You can f…

[glitchered]

foliage is best rendered with masked materials. the reason is simply pixel overdraw. if you wanna fuzz up the hard edges you can also use the temporal dithering node in the shader or enable dithered opacity in the material properties.

[petrow1tch]

looked up what is masked material and pixel overdraw, and from there figured it out. now it looks right and also has correct shading! also the dither opacity gave it somewhat halftone look on the edges, which is not exactly what i expected, but i think it’ll grow on me as it fits the textures themselves

thank you!

[glitchered]

halftone? well… it’s dithered transparency. similar to the hashed alpha blendmode in blender. in unreal you get rid of of the “noise” just by using taa or tsr. that will only show in realtime preview.