Dragoness translucency shader (Patreon)

When we first showed some early prototyping of our upcoming character - dragoness - one of our users asked if the membranes of the wings would be translucent. We instantly liked this idea, and have since then been investigating how to achieve this effect inside Unity.

To our surprise, Unity does not support translucency by default. Implementing our own solution proved to be difficult due to how Unity 5 handles lighting and shadows. There are some translucency shaders that you can find online, but they all suffer from severe limitations in one form or another, such as not working with shadow casting lights or not supporting PBR. So we have spent the last couple of days researching how we could implement our own translucency shader supporting all this. Today we finally managed to get all these areas working together - translucency, shadow casting, shadow reception while still using the PBR lighting model. All in plausible cohesion.

Here are our results so far:

https://gfycat.com/YellowScrawnyEeve

https://gyazo.com/f959aa5368c25d33855f2c013ec88939

Her right side is using our translucency shader, while the left one is using a regular opaque material.

It is more expensive than our standard character shader (although not anywhere near as expensive as fur shading), so we will make it optional.

NOTE! This is extremely early footage, and the translucent data authoring is very rough. But it served us well in trying out and tweaking the tech.

We think this shader is a step in the right direction with our goal of always trying to increase the visual fidelity of the game.

- odes