How to Fix Unreal Translucent Materials Drawing in the Wrong Order With Sort Priority

Unreal sorts translucency per-primitive by distance, which is unstable for stacked or coplanar translucent surfaces like glass layers or decals. An explicit priority breaks the ties deterministically. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Set Translucency Sort Priority

On each translucent primitive component, set Translucency Sort Priority in the Rendering category; higher values draw after (in front of) lower values regardless of distance.

2. Adjust the sort distance offset

Use Translucency Sort Distance Offset for fine biasing of a single component's sort distance when priorities alone are too coarse.

3. Consider Surface ForwardShading for glass

For ordered multi-layer glass, the Surface ForwardShading lighting mode plus sort priorities gives more predictable layering than the default separate translucency.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.