Custom ShaderMaterial occluding GlowLayer despite alpha being (near) 0

Questions
1

ShaderMaterial seems to occlude the GlowLayer, even when the ShaderMaterial’s shader returns an alpha of 0 or close to it. Not sure if there is some setting that I am missing or if this is a bug?

Here is a demo which cycles through some materials on an occlusion plane. The ShaderMaterial (red) seems to block the glow, whereas the PBRMaterial (green) does not occlude the glow. The latter behaviour is what I would expect to happen from the ShaderMaterial as well.

Also a note: setting material1.alphaMode = BABYLON.Constants.ALPHA_ADD; will result in the ShaderMaterial not blocking the glow, but this change is not desirable for my use case.

2

Hello! This seems to be related to how GlowLayer sets up its colors, on the case of PBRMaterial (and StandardMaterial), this is taken from emissiveColor and alpha: Babylon.js/glowLayer.ts at master · BabylonJS/Babylon.js (github.com), but ShaderMaterial doesn’t have emissiveColor so it doesn’t use the alpha either. You can “force” it to use alpha by using customEmissiveColorSelector: ShaderMaterial glow occlusion | Babylon.js Playground (babylonjs.com), I’ll check with the rest of team if that’s the recommended approach :slight_smile:

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3

Another solution that worked for me was to just assign emissiveColor = new BABYLON.Color3(0, 0, 0) to the ShaderMaterial as an expando property. Then the if check linked above will also pass.

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