I''m having problems with alphas sometimes letting an object behind through and other times, blocking it with the clear color. I''ve been checking out the other posts on this but I''m fairly new to opengl and I still don''t understand what''s wrong with my blending setups. Here''s what I see, it''s clearly not what I want. I hope you can tell what''s wrong with it, but in short, the bars are letting you see the black ring but not the bars behind it. Why is this? http://www.mojo9.com/~wickedewok/wrong.jpg Here''s the current set up of my blending functions and my depth testing(might it have anything to do with depth testing?): ::glEnable( GL_TEXTURE_2D ); ::glEnable(GL_BLEND); ::glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); ::glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); ::glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_BLEND); ::glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex ); depthtesting setup: ::glClearDepth(1.0f); ::glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); ::glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); Thanks

In order for transparency to work you have to render polygons in back to front order. You''ll have to sort the polygons such that the furthest are rendered first.

But couldn''t we let OpenGL do that through Z buffering? The program I''m working with(the teacher''s) is not set up to render back to front at all, and it would be a lot of rewriting of the core code to get that to work. I''ve never had trouble doing this in Direct3D even without rendering in order.

Z-Buffering does not sort anything. All it does is keep track of the z-values of each pixel rendered to the screen. When a pixel is incoming, its z-value is compared to what is in the z-buffer at the same location. If the new pixel fails the z-test, it will simply not be rendered.

quote:Original post by Woodoo
Did I said z-buffering would sort anything?

You just gave the reason why you should disable Z-writes before rendering transparent objects. Because else the z-test would fail for everything behind the transparent object (which of course shouldn''t happen).

Sorry, I wasn''t replying to you. I should have quoted Ewok''s post.

Hrmm, thanks for the replies. I think I got it down, but since I wanted any object to be able to have a alpha channeled texture, I guess I really have to render back to front sorted. And isn''t that a really bad idea since we won''t be doing any fast culling - if many things had transparencies?

I know zbuffering doesn''t sort, but it allows for some good optimization in rendering any order, front to back being most efficient.

So let''s say there was a world where any texture can potentially have a transparency. But not all of them do. Would the most efficient way to go about rendering be: find which textures have any portion of their alpha channel bits < 255; then do the sort that way? or do people just brute force back to front? It''s a hypothetical question. I''m just curious now.

-=~''''^''''~=-.,_Wicked_,.-=~''''^''''~=-