Translucent Material Invisibility

Using spotlights (because directional lights are not useful for what I want to do) I wish to keep the lighting that is found in directional lighting.


This is what I want to see at any distance which is possible with directional lighting. However, at a distance, the translucent materials (atmosphere and clouds) disappear as seen below:


Directional lighting keeps the atmosphere and clouds visible no matter the distance. I have tried post processing, light propagation, light importance.

Any clues on how I can do the lighting?

I have seen the video Demystifying the Dot at 53+ minutes, but it still doesn’t do what I want. I’m trying to make a multiplayer game in which planets are light from a single source. I like the use of spotlights because it allows more control over what is seen, but translucent materials seem to turn invisible because the light isn’t reaching the camera.

Are you certain this is not caused by Temporal AA blending your samples? (Can test by changing AA method in unbound post process to FXAA/none)

Transparency has an option for Responsive AA which keeps most of this from happening if it is the problem.

That did no change whatsoever. Others have commented on this strange invisibility for translucent materials.

Oh boy, this was a while ago. Could be a distance sorting issue. Have you tried collapsing your system down to a single material with overlayed clouds/atmospherics?

This could also be a mesh/texture LOD issue to some extent, could try setting your cloud texture to noMipMaps as a quick test.

I have tried changing to noMipMaps. the thing is, I noticed this mostly with only this one planetary blueprint. I bought it from the marketplace, and the maker of it hasn’t answered this question saying to use the directional light. I have tried altering the distance using the console commands: r.TranslucencyLightingVolumeInnerDistance and r.TranslucencyLightingVolumeOuterDistance which seem to work but they get weird after a while. Strange artifacts and behaviors start to happen.