Trouble with transparency.

Scripting Issues
1

Hello,
I have a problem with transparency. I know that this topic was on forum few times and usually it finishes with link to http://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Transparency_and_Blending I don’t understand too much of this manual and earlier forum topics.
My situation is that I’ve got terrain made from big flat polygons. I got transparent canopy in my sailplane. Some parts of canopy(the ones I look more perpendicular at) are transparent, with good alpha. Others (more parallel to line of sight) are in colour of background. The sailplane model and terrain model are siblings in node tree. From Transparency_and_Blending I understood that I have several ways. I’d like the most to explicit control the order of rendering, although I can’t reach howto.control_render_order.txt file. I googled for it and found dead link to CVS.
Any ideas how to get this howto?

I think controlling the order is best, because I’ll have just few sailplanes to compute their distance from camera, terrain, clouds. It seems to be better then to make 10x more polygons to render(splitting big flat polygons way)

I’d appreciate any help.
Lech.

2

There are several render bins, which are essentially render ordering sets. Something like this will make one model render before everything else. But you should check the class documentation for more in-depth information about binning.

model = loader.loadModel("render_before_everything.egg")
model.reparentTo(render)
model.setBin('background',0)
model.setDepthWrite(0) #if you don't want it to affect the Z-buffer
model.setDepthTest(0) #if you want it to draw no matter what is in the Z
3

setBin() works.
Great thanks!