LogInSully shared some insights.
Baldur's Gate 3 has done a lot right, and its see-through-walls effect is one Larian should be proud of. It inspired Mojang's Senior Technical Artist Brendan "Sully" Sullivan to recreate this occlusion cutout effect in Unreal Engine.
The experience taught him a lot, and he kindly shared a breakdown of the feature on X/Twitter.
To make it, you need to create a sphere around the character, run Sphere Trace from them toward the camera, mask the pixels that overlap with the sphere mask, add some tiling noise, and wrap it up in a material function to be used as an alpha mask.
Here is the full breakdown with extra tips:
"The real doozy on top of this is in BG3 they actually utilise this alpha mask to allow mouse clicks to pass through it when it's cut out so you can pathfind to uncovered locations. That's a whole other rabbit hole for later though," the artist said.
If you don't know Unreal Engine, don't worry: Sullivan is sure you can do this in Unity or Godot as well.
To witness his other breakthroughs, follow Sullivan on X/Twitter.
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