RE: [Visualpython-users] Planned work for Fall '01

[David S. <dsc...@vy...>]

> > Seems to be that texturing is harder than [transparency].

No.  Texturing is much easier than transparency in a general-purpose
renderer.
 
> > I realize I am missing something - depth cuing or something.  

Yes, you are missing something.  No, I'm not going to explain it again
:)

> Personally I'd happily settle for a not-so-good 
> transparency if that were easily achievable.

Well, there are lots of not-so-good options:

Additive alpha is easily achievable, and even has a physical
interpretation: an infinitesimally thick glowing surface.  That is, of
course, not what people expect when they ask for transparency :)

Maybe one could come up with a blending mode using the alpha buffer (not
sure about how much hardware support there is for that) that would work
out to "average alpha", which looks like real alpha in the case where
there is only one transparent object, or all transparent objects are the
same color.  In other cases it would be nonphysical but
order-independent and perhaps not visually unreasonable.

Standard (blend) transparency and two-pass (opaque, then transparent)
rendering without sorting is pretty weird, but I suppose for some
applications it might look better than nothing.

However, I'm not really in favor of adding functionality to Visual that
isn't "right"; it's really bad for usability.

Dave