Processing math: 100%

Schedule Syllabus Resources

Transparency

Our colors are actually 4 channels: red, green, blue, and alpha. We will use the alpha channel to aid in rendering transparent objects. The alpha value represents opacity: 1 is fully opaque, 0 is fully transparent.

When rendering transparency, background objects show through a transparent object. There are then two colors to consider, the background one and the transparent one. We will call the background color the destination and the transparent object color the source color. Along with the colors, there is also a source alpha and destination alpha.

We want to combine or blend these colors using two scales: a source factor $s$ and a destination factor $d$. These blend factors are often set using the source or destination alpha.

However, Z-buffering makes transparency difficult. Since the Z-buffer only tracks the closest objects, drawing a nearby transparent object will result in all background objects failing to render, since their depth values will not pass the z test. A common solution is to:

• Render the opaque objects
• Sort transparent objects by view depth
• Render transparent objects farthest to nearest
• Use source factor source alpha, destination factor one minus alpha

This results in the far objects showing through nearer transparent objects based on the near object's alpha value, at the cost of sorting the objects and performing two render passes.

Blending in OpenGL

Blending in OpenGL can be enabled with glEnable(GL_BLEND). The blend factors are set using glBlendFunc(sourceFactor, destFactor). There are many factors that can be used; see the documentation for details. Since the depths in the Z-buffer influence transparency so much, some algorithms disable depth updates, but still perform the depth test. The can be done with the glDepthMask function.

Blend example

Depth testing is enabled and the purple triangle is closer than the yellow.

		Blending function (s,d)
		1, 0	$src_\alpha, 1-src_\alpha$	$dst_\alpha, 1-dst_\alpha$
Draw order	purple, yellow
	yellow, purple