[Solved in year 2026] Optimizing a transparent mesh?

[MoffKalast]

@pspeed

What’s this part about? What’s the dot product for? Are your actual quads billboarded in shader or something?

Remember this thread?

3D Nebula Graphics (How-to)

If you’re interested in finding a good way to implement a realistish looking nebula, look no further So searching for a good solution to making a cool looking nebula I found this video which explains a pretty neat techinique very well, imo. The trick appears to be using a small amount of big quads and additively blending them while a dot product adjusts their opacity to hide unwanted edges. See here if interested: My results: Pretty good I’d say: …

I don’t billboard quads, I adjust their transparency depending on the direction you’re looking at it. Sideways → alpha = 0 and front → alpha = 1 and interpolating in between which makes it seem more like a real cloud and not like a pile of rotating, well, billboards.

@pspeed

I was going from the unshaded example that was still slow.

And yeah subdividing may not have much of a benefit since it’s theoretically all about pixel overdraw… which would happen anyway.

When I tested it there wasn’t any big difference in performance between the two shaders but that may increase if I double the amount of vertices.

@Ogli

But there was this one guy posting his sandstorm shader thingy in the monthly images. So it can be done somehow and hopefully faster than those giant transparent nebula textures which are overlapping each other. Maybe ask that other guy. Or pspeed did something with raytracing in shader too he said.

Yes that was @RiccardoBlb the filter magician, but iirc he said that it was too expensive to run in a game anyway. Unless that tip from Apollo about upscaling solved the problem.