Hi all, I'd like to build this animation effect. It should animate over time the appearance of a mesh by having its faces appear either randomly (ie from zero faces to all of them) or through some sort of pattern (ie given a starting face, have all the others appear through an expanding radius). One simple way to do it would be to animate the VertexBuffer, but it doesn't seem the brightest idea.
Another idea I had would be to use a Vertex Struct having Alpha information and then in the vertex shader fetch from a 1D texture (or float array, which would be faster?) the corresponding alpha value for the given vertex. Perhaps it would be necessary to have a vertexId value in the vertex struct itself? So in the shader I could do (HLSL)
output.color.a = alphaValues[input.vertexId];
In theory if I set all three face vertices' alpha to zero, that face should disappear, correct? Assume that I am not using indices.
Are there any other possibly better ways to do it?