Translucent glowing material?

Hi, I’m a beginner at unreal engine.

So I’m trying to make some fantasy-ish scnene with ue4.

I want to place some sea animals such as turtle and whale in the sky and make them translucent and glowing at the same time. I’ve tried make something out from glass/frosted glass material but I can make it either translucent or glowing.

What I want to make it something like glowing jellyfish below.


Does anybody has an idea to how to make it?

Making a simple glowing translucent material is fairly easy

a) Create a new material and set its type to Translucent, Unlit and probably Double-Sided (depending on the actual model);

b) Connect a constant to the Opacity pin and set it to whatever works the best (I’d say 0.3-0.5, judging by the photo);

c) connect a 3-vector to the Emissive pin and select a color. You may either set the color itself to values more than 1, but the best way is to select a color with values within [0,1] and just multiply it by a scalar value (if you make it a parameter you’ll be able to change it at runtime to affect the glowing strength).

c.1) As you can see in the photo, some areas glow stronger than others and some are more translucent than the others. To achieve this effect you’ll have Unwrap UV of your model and create a custom map for the Emissive and the Opacity values.

1 Like

This is what I needed! Still need to play around with the nodes but you really helped me a lot to get through this. Thank you a lot!