Hi,
how can I make smoother DepthFade effect in Materials? It has only 2 inputs: Opacity and FadeDistance and it has of course alpha and fade but I want to have this even smoother. Is it possible?
Thank you,
Could you maybe show a photoshoped example of what you are trying to accomplish?
Make the fade distance higher would make it “smoother”.
To accomplish the effect you want you need a small depth fade in the opacity, just to get rid of any mesh intersection weirdness.
If you want to have artistic control over the water depth color you probably want to use a different/more wider range depth fade in the alpha of a linear interpolation node (lerp). This way you can tell the material how stuff looks when it is to deep and how it looks when it is less deep. You can combine cyan like colors with a scene texture to get the underwater foggy effect you want.
So don’t look at opacity to much. What you need is 1 lerp node in the base color and interpolate between 2 scene textures with different color variation. 1 being almost not changed at all, and the other being almost completely cyan.
After, you could distort the scene texture uv’s using your water normals.
Here is a custom setup for depth fade, this way you can tweak it however you like, however, I don’t think you need to tweak the default one though. It is just the way you set it up in the base color which makes it look weird.
I think what you are seeing is simply the affect of visual gamma curves.
Your water material is almost black and your sand is almost white. When blending those values using a linear gradient (which depthfade makes), it is going to look like the white values ramp up quicker than black values.
As previous posters mentioned, increasing the fadedistance will increase the width of the current gradient but will not change the appearance of the gamma curve. If you want to mess with the curve, simply use a power.
So try using a power with the depthfade node as the Base and 0.5 or so as the exponent. Then you can play with that as necessary.