Alpha Materials

Tutorial by Amoory

The following tutorial allows you to use alpha materials on character models. It was previously thought impossible until Amoory discovered a workaround which uses the rarely-used M_Chara_Childs_Hair material, which as the name implies is used on the young protagonist in the prologue cutscenes before transitioning to the adult player character. There are however some caveats to this material, such as the lack of combo or normal maps. This may be intentional, given the art style of the game, but the shininess part can be worked around as well.


 * 1) Download the Content.rar file from MEGA.
 * 2) Drag the Contents folder from the .rar file into your Unreal Project folder.
 * 3) Open Unreal Engine and go to Characters/_Shared/Materials/Master/Specifics/M_Chara_Childs_Hair
 * 4) Right-click it and create an Instance.
 * 5) Right-click it and create a Material Instance.
 * 6) Drag the Material Instance to the folder you keep your materials in and name it whatever you like.
 * 7) Open the Material Instance and change the Albedo to your color texture,
 * 8) Change the AlphaMap to your opacity texture (Should be black and white, black indicates opacity while white indicates visibility).
 * 9) Apply it to your skeletal mesh/model and save.

Alpha too shiny for your tastes?
By default the material will appear too reflective or chrome-ish for your particular application, e.g. clothes or hair. To control that, double-click on M_Chara_Childs_Hair material in your content browser, then find the box that says "Roughness". Connect that node to the Roughness property within the M_Chara_Childs_Hair column to the right of the material node editor. Save your changes, then go to every material instance that uses M_Chara_Childs_Hair. You should see a new parameter that says "Roughness". Check the box to the left and set it to something like 0.85. Save everything, cook, then test it ingame.

Special thanks to Asstacular for the tip