I'm not even sure what this would fall under

Scripting Issues
1

So I may a Sun Class that orbits a plane model around the camera node position, always faces camera, and has compass effect. This achieves the effect of a sun far far away that maintains the same location in the sky. (I did this previously by setting the actual geometry REALLLLY far away but that seemed like a bad idea).
The problem now is that the rendered texture (a sun looking thing) disappears for a good portion of the orbit near the horizons. I thought I had it with bin ordering but setting the model bin to “transparent” didn’t change the behavior.
if I zoom out the camera, then I can see the object orbiting completely…so confused

2

Hard to speculate; there are lots of reasons for an object to disappear. I assume you’ve already ruled out the possibility that there’s something in the foreground that’s obscuring it?

David

3

try #2…I thought of that. I removed all other geometry. The only thing that seems to “resolve” the issue is if I set my camera nodepath to “lookAt” the sun object. Then it persists in the orbit as it should. If it helps, my camera otherwise looksAt a nodepath I attach my avatar model to. Even if I look at that nodepath w/o the av model reparented to it, I get the ghostly behavior.

4

What is animating your disappearing object–is it an Actor class? If so, there’s a possibility that its animation will move it outside of its own predetermined bounding volume, and it will get automatically culled. To avoid this, do:

sunActor.node().setFinal(True)

Or, perhaps you are seeing the backside of the object? Try:

sunModel.setTwoSided(True)

For further investigation, I like to reveal the bounding volume:

sunModel.showBounds()

This may provide additional insight if the above ideas don’t help.

David

5

Well bounding volumes for the win! I know I can’t say what I am doing wrong, I don’t even know if I can explain the issue. The bounding volume would rotate with the avatar nodepath (that camera was lookAt) BUT the model of the sun stayed fixed under rotation…I thought that model should’ve been relatve to avnp…but as I stated before, not even sure what Im’ doing wrong. I think I know what direction to go from here though. Thanks for the suggestions.