Transparency

Transparency and 3d rendering with depthbuffer is a tricky topic that isn't completely solved for the general case. The only thing you can do is to find the right rendering technique that suits your specific setup.

Materials

The Stride render system has a render stage for transparent objects. This render stage is called directly after the normal opaque stage. In the transparent stage objects that have a transparency feature connected to the material get rendered. These objects get automaticllay sorted from back to front, only read from the depth buffer and blend themselves over the scene with additive or alpha blending.

There are 3 different transparency fetures: Blend, Additive, or Cutoff. See the Stride Material doc for a detailed description of these modes and their parameters. You can find the nodes for these material features in the node browser in the category [Materials.MiscAttributes.Transparency].

Note

If an object gets moved into the transparent render stage by the render system, it will not write into the depth buffer anymore. This means that it will not occlude other objects.

Custom rendering

If you render your own custom shaders, you can control the blending and the interaction with the depth buffer via the nodes BlendStateDescription + BlendStateRenderTargetDescription and DepthStencilStateDescription. The node RenderEntity also offers the possibility to specify the render stage, see Rendering.

There are also preconfigured blend states like Additive, AlphaBlend and AlphaBlendPremultiplied in the category [BlendStateDescription].

For further reading on this topic and the related problem, you can have a look at the vvvv beta documentation.