Is there an example as to how one would achieve a translucent ice type effect by using an ice texture and painting certain regions of a landscape with some transparency?
If this isn’t possible, how would one go about achieving an almost “icicle” type effect?
Hi Gaudon,
In the Elemental and the Cave Effects projects from the Marketplace you’ll find that there are some Ice materials included with this that could get you started.
With Landscapes though, you can setup your landscape to have opacity but this will apply to all of the texture samples that are in the material.
You can fake this effect by having one landscape as your base and with the areas that you want to be more translucent you can have a static mesh or another landscape that is above it slightly that has this opacity build into it to create the effect.
I hope this helps!
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the reply and I’ll be sure to check out the examples you mentioned. Before I go too far into this, may I ask you if you know much about the performance impact of multiple landscapes? Specifically are you able to comment on mobile deployment (Nexus 5, Android) and if landscapes (singular or plural) are a reasonable resource to use. I ask this because in the past I made an indie game on google play that initially attempted to use Unity terrains. These however, failed miserably on mobile 
Would it be OK to use 1 or even 2 landscapes in UE 4.3 keeping in mind the target platform is Android (current generation hardware)?
Cheers,
Ryan
Landscapes are designed to have their own loads and be pretty efficient.
I’m not sure how it would be on mobile, honestly. This could really depend on the device. In that instance it would probably be better to use a static mesh over that area of that you want to be translucent.
If you’ve not looked at the Mobile performance guidelines take a look at that here.
Do take note of this from the documentation as well:
Use masked and translucent Materials
sparingly, and only in places where
they cover a small part of the screen.
iOS devices are very optimal in
shading opaque surfaces, as they will
only shade each pixel once, most of
the time. But for masked and
translucency, every single layer will
have to be shaded. The total GPU time
of a frame can easily be doubled or
more by having overdraw. Use the
Shader complexity viewmode in Mobile
previewer to investigate hot spots.
There are continual improvements coming for Android and IOs. Some are still a Work-In-Progress that are coming along. The coming months will tentatively have some significant upgrades coming!
Keep any eye on UnrealEngine.com for engine updates and release notes for new engine released!