No Material Transparency

[Wayyllon]

I’m trying to make a fence PBR material via material service, but it just renders any transparency with pure black.

Expected Result, achieved via MeshPart SurfaceAppearance:

Actual Result:

Is there a way to make material service render transparency?
It’s kinda stupid I cant have a material with transparency if I can have a decal or a surface appearance that can.

[Aotrou (Shawn)]

Unfortunately Material Variants treat White and Alpha as the same channel, which as you pointed out is inconsistent with how other texture types handle Alpha.

There is currently an Engine feature request that you should add to:

MaterialService supporting Alpha on Textures

There is a limitation on MaterialService materials where it doesn’t allow the albedo texture to have any form of transparency. This means specific see-through materials like glass, gates, wire fences, etc… Can’t use MaterialVariants. Now it is possible to use a SurfaceAppearance as a workaround, but that requires specific UVs to be baked in for every specific mesh using it. The other option would be using a Texture instance, which has its own limitations: such as only really working on a flat …

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And to answer your question, you’re correct that a Part using a decal or a meshpart using SurfaceApparence would work. Also using a Texture class object is an option, since at least that texture type can tile.