Material - Refraction + overall emissive

Hello UEnginauts!

I am currently working on some particles, and created this “Vertex-count-agnostic morped mesh” for it:

The thing is, due to the refraction I cant get the whole object to be slightly emissive when its dark.
Result in pure darkness:

I can up the emissive all I want, but it only makes the already visible parts emissive… and Id like to make the whole object slightly emissive.
I cannot set the shader to unlit because the vertex animation setup in the shader needs some of the inputs that will be disabled if I do so.

Does anybody have any idea on how to give the mesh some overall brightness regardless of the refraction?

What is the refraction value you are using?

Try 1.05. Refraction value of 1 means no refraction and you should generally keep it between 1-1.1. It wont give you the perfect result but thats as good as it gets with refraction. I had the same issue with vehicle headlights in the past and ended up removing refraction alltogether. : \

doesnt really matter. Ive tried -10, 0, 1, 0.5, lerped it trough fresnels, 100, 10k.
the only way the overall emissive works properly is if I totally disconnect it.

doesnt work, besides already trying any value from -10 to 10 and way beyond it doesnt give me any good results at all.
I need the entire mesh to be lit, not parts of it.

I do appreciate the help though.

Hi Luos -

In your setup, Refraction needs something to refract and your no-lighting scene has no information to pass into the translucent shader. The only way to get the information to show emissive information is to either raise your opacity to closer to one or lower your refraction index.

Here is a brief Test Project to show you:

Test Project 4.9.1

Thank You -

Eric Ketchum

Hey Eric, as always thanks for answering!
Today I was reading into refraction, and some additional attempts to see what kind of results I could get.

After some attempts I ended up with this:

And the result in the end is:

gif version:

And in pitch blackness:

Ill probably add a variable in the blueprint where you can increase emissive for when its night/dark location.

Thanks for the showcase, ill keep it handy when im finalizing this blobbagoop thing.