Captain's Table Project - Transparent Material in Unreal Engine

    Transparent Material

    One of the assets that I modelled for my 3D environment was a magnifying glass. Upon doing my research, I found out that those were one of the many tools that pirate captains used in order to read their maps. Another one of the assets that I modelled for my 3D environment was a telescope, which I also found out was another tool used by pirates a lot in general in order to spot enemies in distance. 

    Both of those assets required me to make a glass material. However, instead using one that I had made in for a previous project, and also instead of making it in Substance Designer, I decided to make it Using Unreal Engine because I knew it's possible and I wanted to learn how to do it. I found this super helpful tutorial on YouTube that thoroughly explains how to do it and also why you go through every step that is presented in it - How To Create A Glass Material - Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - YouTube. 

 

     What I really liked about the glass material shown in the tutorial is that it's not only transparent, it also has a slight hue that becomes quite noticeable when you start rotating either the object or the camera. In my opinion, that makes the glass look a lot more real. I watched and followed the tutorial and this is the final result. 

    Basically, what I did was create a Material Expression Constant 4Vector in order to establish the Constant (the nuance) and the RGBA of the material. Then, I created three constants, as shown in the video, in order to establish the coordinates of the Metallic, the Specular and the Roughness of the material. The Fresnel Material Expression in Unreal is used to calculate how the light reflects at the different intensities based on the position and the angle that the player viewing if from. So we establish the coordinates of that too and then plug it in the power node in order for it to work. In addition to all that, in the end we create two lerps - one that connects to the opacity map (which we must make sure that it's turned on, and that can be done by going into the material and changing the blend mode to translucent), and one that connects to the refraction (which we also must make sure is turned on, and that can be done by going into the material and changing the lightning mode to Surface TranslucencyVolume. The two constants connect to A and to B on both with the set coordinates.

Reference Image

Result in Unreal Engine

    In my next blog entry, I'm going to show you the development of my scene in Unreal Engine. What I would like to do next is make a small animation - basically, because my table is set in exterior settings, I wanted to give the viewer the impression that it's not only stormy, but it's also quite windy - and how I'm going to do that is by adding a little animation to a signpost/s that I have in my scene by making it/ them (because I'm not sure yet how many of them I'm going to have in my scene) swing in the air, because of the wind.