Transparency: What is considered to be transparent?

General Discussion
1

If I recall correctly, Panda3D automatically recognises a loaded object having a transparent texture, and assigns such objects to the “transparent” bin. First of all, do I have that correct?

If so, what are the conditions for considering an object to be “transparent”? I gather that having a semi-transparent colour-texture would qualify, but would a semi-transparent normal map do so, too? And if an object has more than one colour-texture, do any of the textures after the first count towards it being considered “transparent”?

[edit]
What about vertex-colours, come to that? How do they influence the sorting, if at all?
[/edit]

And finally, I know that I can examine which objects are considered to be transparent by including " show-transparency 1" in my “prc” file. Does this cover everything that has been automatically sorted into the “transparent” bin? If not, is there a way to see what has been so sorted?

2

Normally, one can specify a specific <Scalar> alpha { on } (or other mode) tag, which enables the equivalent of node_path.set_transparency(TransparencyAttrib.M_alpha), which indeed causes the object to be sorted into the transparent bin.

When such a tag is not specified, Panda3D sets it to on if any of the following conditions apply:

  • If any texture applies to the model with an alpha channel.
  • If the material has a diffuse color with alpha value other than 1.0.
  • If the primitive has a color with alpha value other than 1.0.
  • If any of the vertices of the primitive has an alpha value other than 1.0.

You can override this default behaviour by explicitly setting your own alpha mode, either in the <Texture> or in the primitive.

This will flash object with a color dependent on which TransparencyAttrib mode is applied. Different TransparencyAttrib modes will do different things, but the plain old M_alpha does do nothing more than sort it into the transparent bin indeed.

If you specifically want to flash objects that are in a specific bin, you can do something like this:

mgr = CullBinManager.get_global_ptr()
bi = mgr.find_bin("transparent")
mgr.set_bin_flash_active(bi, True)
mgr.set_bin_flash_color(bi, (1.0, 0, 0, 1.0))
3

Aah, interesting, and thank you.

The code that you posted is quite useful! With it causing the “transparent” bin to flash, I see some things flashing that aren’t intended to be transparent–but rather less than I expected. As almost all of my normal-maps make use of their alpha-channel, I somewhat expected much of my game to end up flashing!

As to vertex-colours, I do in some cases store data in the alpha channel of my vertex-colours. I may thus want to remember to specify that objects in which I do so not be considered transparent, where called for.