Soft-Edge material for particles (material nodes overview included)

[Prea]

Hey guys I made a quick video demonstrating the use of soft edge particles to my team, figure I'd share it with you guys as well.




Add the following nodes to your opacity slot in the material editor:


0.01 = Scale, you may tweak this value if you like.

I hope you guys will find this useful, I was unable to find any UDK specific resources on soft particles so I decided to share this.

HLSL source: http://www.gamerendering.com/2009/09/16/soft-particles/

[shadowlurker]

Neat. Thanks for posting this!

[redbox]

differences between this and DepthBias?

[Prea]

differences between this and DepthBias?

This method reduces the opacity of the material when it gets closer to geometry. DepthBias changes the depth of the material you're about to draw to push it towards the camera, attempting to avoid the geometry clipping.

From my experiences depthbias doesn't work well enough for our purposes especially with a preset bias value.

[joshua.fontany]

Nice! Definitely appreciate you sharing your node setup.

[Prea]

Nice! Definitely appreciate you sharing your node setup.

No problem, I hope you will find it useful.

[MOTHERJAVA]

Nice idea, thanks for sharing!

[Prea]

Before people run into trouble using this with their particles. You still need to use the Alpha of VertexColor-node and multiply it with the value you get from my nodes I posted above. Otherwise you loose the ability to fade-in/out your particles through Cascade (this is what I heard from one of my artists, I don't usually work with Cascade at all)

[brad4ever]

thanks for sharing

[redbox]

ok, looks like it better. thank you!