Omniverse Material Graph --- difficulty in creating a shader that can create a Xray or see through effect for automotive visualization

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization MDL SDK
1

I am trying to create a shader that can have a “See Through” or “XRay” effect for automotive visualization.

Basically when such material is applied, it will make surface partially transparent but still show some contours or edges for the surfaces …

Example. when I enable it on outer vehicle surface, internal parts of the vehicle surface will be seen .. like that …

Now, I could do it very easily in Blender 4.5.2 by mixing a Principal DSDF shader node with a custom node. This custom node took a dot product of incoming and normal direction (given by geometry node of Blender).

Now when trying to replicate such effect in Omniverse MAterials graph, the main difficulty is that Omniverse material graph does not have any node that has the “incoming direction” like the “Geometry” node in Blender 4.5.x.

Attached is the Blender XRay shader done in Blender. If something equivalent can be done using Omniverse Material Graphs let me know …

Can anyone help me in finding out how this effect could be achieved using Omniverse Material Graphs.

Regards,

Atul

XRayShader.zip (122.3 KB)

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Hi Atul,
thanks for reaching out!
I understand what you are trying to achieve and it makes a lot of sense.
However, MDL is designed to develop PBR (physical plausible) materials. What you are aiming for is is more an NPR feature (non-photorealistic rendering). This is in general possible but requires special support from the renderer. This means the materials are not portable unless all applications involved implement them.

The RTX renderer in Omniverse is not supporting this at the moment and we would need to file a feature request. I’ll find out what’s needed.

Kai