Correct visualization of transparent planes

[bgolus]

Efficient and correct sorting of 3D transparency is an unsolved problem for real-time rendering.

Render Mode - Transparent doesn't work see video

This is working as expected. Efficient, and correct sorting of 3d transparency in real time rendering is still an unsolved problem. There have been a number of attempts to fix this or mitigate it, but they all come with a fairly significant performance hit. The way any single model is rendered is each polygon of a model is rendered in the order they exist in the model’s definition. In the case of opaque or cutout each polygon writes to the depth buffer. Each new polygon drawn will test against…

I talk a bit about various work arounds and approximations here:

Is it possible to fix the Transparency + Depth sorting issue?

Order Independent Transparency (OIT) is the search term you’re looking for. To do accurate per pixel transparency sorting is extremely expensive to do on modern graphics cards, though it is possible. To do it in Unity would require essentially not using any of Unity’s built in shaders, and possible not use any of Unity’s built in renderer components. Pretty much no one does this outside of some tech demos and specific applications, these days it’s probably cheaper to “just” do GPU based raytrac…

And I posted an example shader using Stochastic Transparency here (requires 4x MSAA to function properly):

Stochastic transparency

If you’re using AlphaToMask On in your shader (which is Unity’s flag for enabling alpha to coverage), yes. But modern GPUs it’s the same 50% of coverage samples for every pixel, so you don’t get the benefits of stochastic transparency. Overlapping 50% alpha objects will completely cover each other. Older GPUs, like 8+ year old ones, used to do some amount of dithering or noise automatically with alpha to coverage, but not anymore. If that’s all you want, then yes, you don’t need anything extra.…