Order Independent Transparency?

Hi all –

Does anyone have any additional pointers/resources that helped you for understanding order independent transparency? I downloaded the wiki’s Transparency Order Independent.toe file to see it broken down more and was confused by the conflicting, “Transparent objects should be
drawn in farthest to closest order. Objects with higher draw priority are drawn first.” versus “With Order Independent Transparency, the draw order of your objects does not matter. Thus we can set the draw priority of all objects to 0.” written in the file. Not entirely sure how to set it up, then, do I bother with the Depth Peel at all or no?

For more clarity on what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m just trying to get a translucent effect of this little red orb floating inside this noisy-blob. Does it look like I set it up right at least?

Screen Shot 2018-01-19 at 6.48.04 PM.png

Thank you!

hey syang,

As you can read in the first paragraph on the Transparency wiki page, there are two different ways to render correct transparency in TD:

  1. By rendering your objects farthest to closest order and turning on blending (labor-intensive to set up).

OR

  1. By using the “Order-Independent Transparency” feature in the Render TOP (easy but consumes more of your graphics processor).

So those two texts you mention are regarding those 2 different methods, you can choose which method you want to use. In your case I would choose the method 2, Order independent transparency, which is easy to set up. If you ever notice a big drop in framerate in you can always investigate how use method 1.

I’ve simplified that example further to only use method 2, hope this helps you set it up
order_independent_transparency-simplified.tox (3.39 KB)

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Thank you for simplifying that, it helped me break it down more! Realized that it’s all in the alpha front in the phong’s parameter.