How can you have a transparent ring around a transparent planet?

[s-elliot-perez]

Hello! I have a Saturn-like planet with a ring around it. If I set the planet material’s texture to Opaque, it works fine, ie. the ring goes around the front of the planet and becomes invisible behind it:

However, I want to set the planet as well as the ring to have variable transparency, so I need to set them to either Transparent or Fade. When I do so, the planet appears in front of all parts of the ring:

How I can have both transparent ring & planet AND have the ring appear to wrap around the planet properly? The 1st image has the Inspector settings for the Ring Material. The 2nd image has those of the Planet, which are the same as the Planet’s settings in the 1st image except for the Rendering Mode. The planet consists of spheres of different sizes inside one another, though they all share the same material.

Now I’ve tried editing the render queue of both objects, but one will always appear in front of the other entirely.

[bgolus]

Yep, this is how real time transparency works.

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…

Your options are either the planet or the ring needs to be opaque. Or you need to break up the ring into multiple pie slice segments and control the sorting order manually via script.

[s-elliot-perez]

Wow! So it really is impossible as it is. Thanks for the swift reply. I posted this on Unity Answers several weeks ago and got nothing. I’ll try the slice method.