Transparency of 3d surface vertices

[rdb]

@Sina_Mansour_L

I tried multisample antialiasing (the code below, not sure if that’s what you meant), but it didn’t have any effect on the resulting render:

No, you need to set the transparency mode to TransparencyAttrib.MMultisampleAlpha, this has nothing to do with antialiasing. You should also make sure you are requesting multisample properties in your framebuffer, by putting this in Config.prc:

framebuffer-multisample true
multisamples 8

@Sina_Mansour_L

On a further update, I tried reordering the triangles every time before a new render (using tasks). However, I’m not sure why the reordering had no effect on the renders, it seems that the initial order of the triangles matters. Here’s what my code looks like:

You shouldn’t keep around a memoryview across frames. Panda has no idea that you even modified the data this way, since memoryview is a Python construct. You should re-obtain a writable handle to the data with modify_array(0) and re-create the memoryview for every frame in which you need to modify the data. If you were using the threaded pipeline, you would even get a deadlock here because Panda would refuse to render while you’re still holding a writable handle to the data.

@rdb

Another method is per-pixel linked lists.

So, I got nerd-sniped by my own link, and I implemented OIT using per-pixel linked lists:

Order-Independent Transparency using Per-Pixel Linked Lists

Here is a minimal implementation of Order-Independent Transparency using Per-Pixel Linked Lists in Panda3D, a technique for handling transparency and blending in a pixel-perfect manner. It works by rendering the scene with a fragment shader that stores all transparent fragments in an external linked-list, with the head of that linked-list associated with the current framebuffer pixel. Then, in a post-processing shader, this list is sorted and blending is performed back-to-front. It needs adva…

However, this method does have some drawbacks compared to depth peeling, notably the steep OpenGL version requirement, and the demands on GPU memory (and the not-so-graceful failure when you run out of this memory). I might add this to Panda in a future version, but it probably cannot replace depth peeling, especially for older cards.