I have made a material recently with a red “A” on top of a glass shader. I had a bunch of problems ensuring that the “A” decal was unaffected by the transparency so that only the glass shader would be transparent, but I somehow figured it out:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-does-texturesample-map-transparency-to-black/672182
I am trying to reapply one of my blender materials to a mesh in UE5. I made a glass vial with some text on the outside and I want to create a material which uses a glass shader onto which I can map my texture, which has a transparent background. For some reason, when I use the RGBA output of TextureSample and plug that into the BaseColor for a translucent material with Surface TranslucentVolume lighting model, my texture doesn’t remain transparent where it is transparent, but turns black… I di… But now I simply copy and pasted my material and exchanged the image texture for an equivalent green “B” and somehow it doesn’t work anymore. Now the decal is, again, being affected by the opacity of the glass shader and I don’t know what is supposedly different. It should be exactly the same since all I did was to changes the source of the TextureSample node.
What am I missing?
PS: When I first imported the “B” texture (with transparent background, obviously) it showed a star in the content drawer and said the Source Compression was “zlib”. I thought that might be the problem. However, after I saved my game and relaunched the editor, it was PNG compressed and didn’t have a star, so that wasn’t the issue, apparently.
Apparently it has something to do with what channels I connect to the opacity, but since I'm a bleeding amateur I have no idea what I need to connect to what in order to fix this.
Here’s the images of the node setup of the materials:
The working “A” letter
The “B” one where the letter is almost invisible:
