How to combine materials in unreal engine?

General Discussion
#1

I’ve been working on a transition effect for a video game I’m making, but I’ve reached a hard spot. I have a transition effect material, however, the only way to make this effect play is to replace the character’s normal materials with the transition effect one. Is there an effective way to combine these so that the effect can play while the character’s materials stay in tact? I would prefer not having to remake all my current materials. Is there a way to make a dissolve in effect with particle effects?

#2

Your current technique of switching out materials to a transition material is usually the prefered one. Transition materials tend to be quite a bit more expensive then the standard one, so having it take up processing constantly is something to be avoided.

That being said, it’s hard to give any specific advice for your case without seeing the way you’ve set these materials up. For example, if you made your transition material so it displays the same as the normal material on progression 0 it might be as simple as keeping that parameter on 0 throughout gameplay.

#3

@Niels Heres my setup:

I change the fresnel’s power param via timeline in blueprints

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#4

@Niels Actually, do you know how to make the material transparent, because doing so may let me add it onto the mesh as an additional material slot?

#5

What if you do it like this instead?
image

That way, at .5 it still looks the way you imagine it, but at 0 and 1 you have the extremes of the fresnel and so your glowy colour will be either completely visible or completely gone.

[0.5]
image

[0]
image

[1]
image

So during normal gameplay you would leave the Progression at 1, then when you want to transition you can quite simply change the value to 0, transition, then change it to 1 again.

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#6

@Niels That works really nice, thanks!! I need to somehow put this transition effect material over the base materials of my characters (my game features a bunch) so I don’t have to go remaking all the base materials. Do you know how this can be done?

#7

You could use an opacity mask, but that might give you even more trouble.

I think the smartest method is to put this in a material function, and adding that material function to all of the materials that need transitioning. It’s a bit of work now, but at least when you change your transition method you’re only gona have to change it once.

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#8

@Niels I’m still kindof a noob: do you mean material functions to “combine” materials? I believe these are called “layered materials”?