How to recreate the helmet effect with fake transparency like in Fortnite? (UE5)

Technical & Engine Help Unreal Engine Help
1

Hello everyone,

I’m working on a character with a glass helmet in Unreal Engine, and I want to recreate an effect similar to Rippley vs Sludge in Fortnite. The goal is to see only the character’s head through the helmet, without seeing the environment behind it.

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I have tried several methods:
:heavy_check_mark: Using transparent materials, but this makes the helmet fully transparent, which is not the desired effect.
:heavy_check_mark: Opacity masks, but they don’t prevent the environment from being visible through the helmet.

It seems like Fortnite uses a “fake transparency shader”, possibly by combining a Render Target with a SceneCaptureComponent2D to display only the head inside the helmet.

Does anyone have a precise idea of how to recreate this effect? I would appreciate any help regarding materials, Blueprints, or any other method that could achieve this effect!

Thanks in advance for your help! :blush:

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They’re not using render textures, or fake transparency for either of these.

For Rippley & Sludge, they appear to be abusing WPO to push the “head” mesh’s vertices towards the camera so it shows up “on top” of the body. At certain angles the head mesh ends up clipping against the body and disappearing revealing this as likely being the trick used. Use the Shadow Switch to only do the WPO when not calculating the shadow.

For a more “fishbowl” style setup, you can do this a lot more easily by having an “opaque” (or transparent but 1.0 Opacity so you can use non-directional shading) inverted interior mesh that prevents you from seeing anything through it, and then a normal transparent mesh for the oustide of the helmet. The “head” is an otherwise totally normal opaque mesh inside.

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