I tried posting this earlier, but it never showed up on the list... I have put this off far too long, but before I dive into this I have a few questions. First how I think it is supposed to work. 1. My understanding is every single alpha blended shape has to be sorted by our own code, if not on every frame, at least when the user has moved far enough to warrent a re-sort. 2. If a scenegraph (like a loaded model) has some shapes which are blended and some that are not, you have to remove the blended shapes from the scenegraph and place them in a separate graph with all the other blended shapes. 3. Any shapes which are part of one "model" but which themselves intersect, have to be broken into pieces. So for example of a tree where you want to have two intersecting planes for the "branches", plus a rounded blended internal shape (like a cube standing on one corner), plus the solid trunk... you would have to break the planes in half and break the cube into pieces. 4. Then once you have all these items in pieces you have to put them in an ordered group and sort them by distance from farthest to nearest. Questions: 1. I "thought" there was something added to OrderedGroup in 1.2 to support easily resorting it, but I can't find anything in the docs. Given the horrible overhead of attaching and detaching, what is the best way to do this? 2. How have other people solved this problem? Specifically in relation to trees and plants, which rely almost completely on transparency to achieve the proper look. 3. Has anyone written a manager for this which they are willing to post to the group? If we get some good responses to this I will forward this to Justin to include in the FAQ. Dave Yazel Cosm Development Team =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
