[SOLVED] material opacity level

[carl.sutton]

Hello.

 

Is there a base material that can handle an opacity level (i.e a 0 - 1 value that can represent semi-transparancy). I've been playing with the material library sample and have failed to find a parameter that can handle this. Does one exist or is there a standard approach for achiving this with unigines current material set?

[ulf.schroeter]

Just enable blending on material (see documentation on different source/dest blend mode combination effects)

[carl.sutton]

Hi Ulf. Wouldn't that require storing the transparency data within the texture, such as in the alpha channel? This isn't really what I want as I want to be able to dynamically change the transparncy level without having to rewrite the texture each time. Perhaps I'm just missing something but I thought opacity level would be a rather common shader parameter, or perhaps just a little easier to use. In short, do I need to write my own shader code for this or not?

[ulf.schroeter]

You should be able to achive this via material color scale parameter by activating material transparency and dynamically setting color scale values with variing alpha scale values e.g. vec4(1,1,1,0) <-> vec4(1,1,1,1). This should produce your effect even for simple RGB textures without alpha channels

[carl.sutton]

Thanks Ulf. Thats exactly what I was looking for.