Question about 3ds and transparency

Troubleshooting graphics
1

Hi.



I have just discovered jMonkey for myself and am writing a strategy game using it. However while checking through the tutorials i came upon the following statement under this link


They have advantages (3ds supports animation) and disadvantages (obj does not support transparency. 3ds loses transparency after import?).


I wanted to ask how the 3ds loader acts now - is the info in that tutorial outdated or are there still problems using significant features of the 3ds format? One of the reasons I am asking is that there is a project out there by Jerome Jouvie who has created also an object loader for several (including 3ds) formats and according to him the loader supports all the advanced features of the formats. (Check under his OpenGL Projects).

Should I be concerned about this transparency issue? If yes, has anyone of you used Jouvie's loader in conjunction with jMonkey or do you think it is even possible?
2
Mindgamer said:

Should I be concerned about this transparency issue?

No. Transparency is not a geometry, but a texture feature. jME supports alpha channel transparency for all image formats that can provide it.
All you have to do to make a model show up with transparent parts is to apply an AlphaState to it, and put it into the QUEUE_TRANSPARENT render queue, and you're set. If your model loader doesn't already do this, you can easily fix that with a few lines in your own code.
If this doesn't make sense right now, just go through a few jME tutorials, and you'll get a solid grasp of how transparency works in jME/OpenGL.
And btw, welcome to jME!  :)
3

I think what they guy meant was that .OBJ doesn't support vertex color… either way you can still get global transparency by using glColor or the material properties in the mtllib file.

4

Thank you for the replies.