A character’s hair can appear partly transparent even when the renderer is not treating every point as a conventional translucent surface. One technique uses a dithered coverage pattern: some samples remain visible while others are discarded.
Epic’s Unreal Engine material example demonstrates DitherTemporalAA. It provides a concrete example of temporal dithering, rather than proof that every game with grainy hair uses that function.
Three different ways to read an edge
Imagine a simple mesh carrying a picture of a leaf. With an entirely opaque material, the mesh’s rectangular background can remain visible. A masked material uses a coverage decision to remove parts of that rectangle. Conventional translucency instead blends a surface contribution with what is behind it.
Dithering can distribute visible and discarded samples to suggest intermediate coverage. When a temporal method combines information from multiple frames, a changing pattern can appear smoother. The tiny pattern is doing work that a still close-up may make surprisingly obvious.
These approaches have different rendering implications; they should not be ranked by a single slogan such as “transparency is expensive.” The material, engine, scene and target hardware all matter. The useful first distinction is what the renderer is being asked to represent.
Why this matters to players reading technical notes
A patch note that changes a hair material may address coverage, shading or reconstruction rather than replacing the character model. Those are separate pieces of the final image. A higher polygon count would not automatically solve an unsuitable coverage pattern.
If you report an issue, identify the affected material and situation: a fringe over a bright sky, foliage against a wall or a fading object. State whether it appears only during a transition or persists afterwards. A short clip can give developers the changing context that one enlarged screenshot omits.
Avoid identifying the exact rendering technique from appearance alone. The same visible grain may have another cause elsewhere in the image pipeline. Understanding the vocabulary helps you describe what you see and read a developer’s explanation, while leaving the actual diagnosis open until there is evidence.