Paper Covering Windows - Subsurface Scattering

Garasin · Feb 2015

Hey guys,

I'm having a bit of a mental block. I'm currently building a scene that has a couple of windows and they're all covered by paper. The sunlight outside is the only light source in the scene...

I'm having trouble getting lighting into my scene. From my understanding that in the real world the paper would allow a good chunk of the light to bleed through the paper. The problem is I'm having trouble replicating this in UE4. I'm currently using a very basic subsurface material to try and do this but it's not producing the results I need and I'm not sure how to progress from here.

Please forgive the horrid lightmap errors. They will totally be fixed as soon as I get a handle on getting some light into the scene!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

ZacD · Feb 2015

It might be better to just make the paper translucent and not SSS. I'd also put lights in front of the paper, it'd be easier to control the look of the lighting. Remember this is a video game scene, lights don't have to be placed realisticly as long as it looks good.

Harbinger · Feb 2015

This is a highly specific scene too, I'd just take one of the channels of your base color textures, multiply it down a bit, and add a tiny amount of emissive to each paper. That way you can have the white areas a tiny bit emissive while the dark (inked) areas aren't.

I'm talking a tiny amount of emissive in total, just to help the paper blend a bit more.

passerby · Feb 2015

Also remeber it is a concpet which likely dosnt have realistic lighting anyways. So if the concept can take artistic liberty you can and will have to as well.

Paper Covering Windows - Subsurface Scattering

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