NVIDIAGameWorks
[Runtime Feature]: Translucent Roughness
What is the context of the feature/improvement?
Seeing the improvements that have been made to the renderer here recently. A roughness configuration for translucent materials could be doable.
Please describe the feature/improvement?
Roughness for translucents.
What would be your solution? (optional)
No response
Version
x.x.x
Media
No response
Easier said than done unfortunately. If it was easy to do we would've already included it, but the choice to not have such things was intentional in the initial design at least. Right now translucent materials are handled via PSR which lets them look great but of course only supports perfectly smooth roughness.
The main issue with anything else is a denoising problem really, things like NRD are pretty much only meant for opaque surfaces so the nature of a rough translucent one confuses it and can cause light to smear across the surface. I have yet to see how something like DLSS-RR handles it though, so it may be worth re-considering if it handles it better (though non-Nvidia GPUs will still have to deal with the NRD path). Needless to say though how to denoise such things in a good way is still a bit of an open problem, so that's what is preventing it rather than a matter of implementing a specific type of material.
Note that we're closing this issue for now since we don't have any immediate plans for it, but it may be something we will do some day (especially if denoising technology gets better to the point of making it more viable). Just not on any immediate sort of roadmap for us currently.