Since this question is kind of lost in my other posting I am pulling this
out as a separate post.
I have the following structure for each terrain patch:
BranchGroup
DecalGroup
Shape3D1 (multi-textured, no transparency)
Shape3D2 (multi-textured, transparent, same geometry as Shape3D1)
Shape3D3 (multi-textured, transparent, same geometry as Shape3D1)
In a few cases I could see a blended splat *through* a hill. So the texture
was
for an occluded patch, yet the alpha splat was visible through the hill.
This suprises me since I am using decal groups for the shapes. Since the
bottom texture (Shape3D1) is *not* transparent and only the coplanar ones
are, then I
would assume this would not be rendered in a seperate alpha pass. For me to
see a layer through an opaque hill it would require that Java3d was
rendering all the layers as transparent objects *and* disabling zbuffer
writing for all layers. This could also contribute to a performance
degradation since that means even more overdraw than is necessary.
So my questions are:
1. If you have a decal group with some transparent objects coplanar objects
then are the alpha blended shapes rendered in the alpha stage, or in the
opaque stage of the java3d frame cycle? Since it is copanar there is no
reason to not render each shape one after another irregardless of whether it
is alpha blended or not.
2. Is there something I should do to "force" the multiple passes to be done
consecutively.
3. How can I tell if DecalGroup has fallen back to OrderedGroup for its
implementation?
Is this the *right* way to be implementing multi-pass blending?
Thanks in advance!
David Yazel
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