I’ve been playing around with ParticleSystem and transparency in babylon and found some weird behavior.
It is stated in the docs (Transparency and How Meshes Are Rendered - Babylon.js Documentation) that ParticleSystem is rendered after all the alpha-blended meshes. But in reality if I render a semi-transparent mesh (with visibility 0.99 for example), I notice that it covers my particles independent of what alphaIndex I set to it.
You can see that sphere covers the particle system even if particles are in front of it.
I understand that making particles respect sphere surface may be tricky because of the zbuffer stuff, but for my purposes it would suffice to render the scene the other way - i.e. to have particles rendered on top of the sphere (including the ones that are inside).
Is it possible? I am currently looking at SPS which seems to be promising, but is there any way to do that with the simple ParticleSystem?
I’ve been thinking about using renderingGroupId. But I also want to render some other opaque meshes on top of the particle system, so I wanted to keep objects on the same layers to use the depth buffer.
Then I realized I can use scene.setRenderingAutoClearDepthStencil(2, false); in order to preserve depth buffer between layers. So I implemented my idea in the new playground version and it works just as I need it to: https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#0AGXE8#18.
Thank you for this solution. Solved my problem, but raises another question. Has this doc been fixed? I’m only asking because I did the exercise just now of searching through the complete section of ‘particles’ in the new/post-4.2 docs but, couldn’t find this information in this section. Actually, to get a clear understanding of how particles interact with (mesh) alpha blending, you would need to goto
I think there could be a more obvious/visible link to this information in the section ‘particles’ (or in the search, or search with expression…it would have saved me a bit of time, not a lot, but a bit;). A simple suggestion. Have a great day
