Making Him Invisible

For our "ghost" character, we have moments in the film where he is supposed to fade into existence. I decided to do this within Unreal so to do so I made a material parameter collection. The I went into the materials for the spooky character and created some nodes for opacity control. Those being a dither node, collection parameter, multiply parameter, and a constant node. Then convert the constant into a parameter and set its default value to 1. Then in the collection parameter node I set the collection to the material parameter collection I made earlier. I called it SpookyIntruderOpacity so others on the team knew what was being keyed in the sequencer track. Then you hook those nodes up together and plug that set of nodes into the opacity mask of the main material node. I also changed the blend mode from opaque to mask for the opacity mask to work. By default it is set to opaque. I did this for all three of the character's materials but set each of them to the same material parameter collection so they would all change collectively.

After that I created a new track in the sequencer for the material parameter collection. Then I was able to key where i wanted him to start fading or fade out. We can also play with having him slightly see through throughout the whole thing if we wanted. Again probably not but it this seemed the easiest way to achieve this process and with more flexibility if we decided to change something. But I will say this was more work than I thought it would be to add opacity to a mesh. But after going through the process a couple times I was able to get the nodes set up pretty quickly.