Translucent material's color added to the translucent material behind?

[Santewi]

I have an 3D wave effect on my ocean using tessellation, but when there are waves behind another one, the color of both gets added together. Blend mode is set to translucent, and opacity is based on depth. How do I get rid of that?

Pics:

[Black_Stormy]

I don't think translucency is what you want for an ocean. For each cm of depth in water, more light is occluded, resulting in only being able to see about a meter or so into murky water. To replicate that you'd be better off trying to fake sss. Although if you want the water to be clear I would suggest that instead of using the water plane to define the colour, you use the colours of the assets and a bit of colour correction to simulate the colour change, and focus on making the water plane itself look like water. You shouldn't need much, if any colour on the water plane at all.

That all said, it doesn't fix your problem for this, or other applications. And I'm afraid I have no idea. Perhaps if you do some research on the science behind graphical translucency simulation it might shed some light on the requirements of it in unreal?

[Santewi]

I don't think translucency is what you want for an ocean. For each cm of depth in water, more light is occluded, resulting in only being able to see about a meter or so into murky water. To replicate that you'd be better off trying to fake sss. Although if you want the water to be clear I would suggest that instead of using the water plane to define the colour, you use the colours of the assets and a bit of colour correction to simulate the colour change, and focus on making the water plane itself look like water. You shouldn't need much, if any colour on the water plane at all.

That all said, it doesn't fix your problem for this, or other applications. And I'm afraid I have no idea. Perhaps if you do some research on the science behind graphical translucency simulation it might shed some light on the requirements of it in unreal?

I was hoping there would be a way to "clamp" the color value the object/material "lets through".

Of course I could set the opacity to 1 while reducing it based on depth (like I have now), but the waves' color is still added together, even with a simple RGB value plugged into diffuse and a constant 1 into opacity. The material cannot be (partly) opaque if the blend mode is set to translucent?

[Santewi]

Alright, now the material is finally fully opaque, but it's still adding the colors together if they are over each other on the same mesh. Using two different meshes will not cause the color to be added to each other. Does anyone know what is causing this? I really wouldn't want to split my ocean into thousands of small planes just because of this...