While playing Elden Ring one thing that I noticed is that most of transparency is handled through dithering this time around. Basically, ghosts are alpha-dithered, and the only alpha-blended things I recall were particle visuals.
Is this a common trend these days?
I wouldn’t say it’s a common trend these days much as it is something that’s just a lot less of a hassle to do when working with deferred rendering, especially when dealing with multiple transparent objects overlapping one another. In Elden Ring’s case, bodies dissolving can be transparent, but the player can also be made transparent in some camera situations, as well as things being embedded in the player that have to fade away like arrows.
All these things are fundamental nightmares when dealing with deferred renderers, which is why we’ve seen a trend towards some games using hybrid renderers or clustered forward over the past several years.
I’ve only ever seen it used for “abstract” transparency- like fading-out foreground objects that are blocking the players view, for example. It looks very artificial, but since it’s not something that actually happening in the game’s universe then there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t need to look a certain way.
For in-universe transparency, like a glass bottle or a window, you want it to look more realistic, so you’d usually use an alpha blended transparent material. If Elden Ring is using dithered transparency for ghosts, that’s a new one for me, but there could be a technical reason. With dithered transparency you can use depth-buffer sorting so you don’t have the same type of sorting headaches that you have for alpha blended materials.
I haven’t played Elden Ring, though, Are there scenes with lots of ghosts on screen at the same time, maybe?
Souls likes have ghosts of other players running around and bloodstains. you get close to a bloodstain and touch it, you’ll see red ghost depicting how someone died. When you move through the area randomly, sometimes you see white ghosts of other players passing through the area.
But ther aren’t a lot of them. There is a town filled with the ghosts, but I cant recall for the life of me if they were alpha-dithered or not, because I was too busy not to get killed by them. Likewise, I’m unsure if the message ghosts (see below) were alpha-dithered or not.
“You don’t have the right” trolling.
Can’t tell if this guy is alpha-dithered or not, because he isn’t moving.
One good reason to use alpha-dithering for those, however is that they automatically handle depth. So ghosts do not look like inflatable shells.
Still, I was a bit surprised at large number of alpha-dithered effects.
Oh yes, and I forgot about that. Didn’t I read somewhere that Unity’s deferred renderer just skips alpha-blended transparent objects and then renders them in a completely separate (forward-renderer) render pass?
I know Elden Ring does not use Unity, but similar challenges are present regardless of the engine.
Games have been using this mostly when they need to make opaque objects temporarily translucent, because they can still be lit, and cast/receive shadows without having to use a completely different render path. A robust TAA solution can mitigate the dithering and make it look alpha-blended-ish.
Those ghosts in Elden Ring are a strange use case, since they aren’t lit. Maybe they used it as an easy way around the extra complexity needed to avoid depth issues, which are a common occurrence when you try to make a ghost-looking character.