I need a little help with transparency

[Penny]

Hi,

I understand from reading some threads that transparency can cause rendering artifacts if not applied correctly and this is where I am at.

I have transparent spatials where there is no face culling, this is to see the back face through the front face of a partially transparent object. The back face is not rendering properly.

Also, in my scene, I could have multiple transparent spatials that intersect each other. These spatials do not render correctly if they have a simular z value from the camera.

I looked to see if there is a multipass transparency renderer filter but as I am unfamiliar to this degree with jmonkey, I will really appreaciate if someone could explain how to setup the transparency filter etc so it works correctly.

Many Thanks

[pspeed]

First, if you haven’t read this then you should:

Alpha/Transparency Sorting, Your Z-buffer, and You

Since this comes up every three or four days, I decided to put together some visual aids. There is often a lot of confusion with how pixels get processed in relation to the z-buffer and why sorting is important. Most importantly it can be mind-warping trying to wrap one’s head around how to ‘fix’ the cases where proper sorting isn’t possible. Hopefully these diagrams help show the futility of it all… I mean the trade offs one has to make to get transparency looking its best in the general cas…

…you may have already.

Anyway, for the inside outside thing you will have to render it as two separate meshes or two separate sets of faces and force the ordering. There is really no other way.

For interpenetrating objects, you are pretty much out of luck. If you imagine even a scene as simple as two semi-transparent interpenetrating triangles, there is no proper order for rendering them that won’t generate artifacts.

What kind of stuff is it that you are attempting to render?