I was actually talking about alpha blending in unreal engine 3 and doom 3 engine, not in blitz3d
They are both very, very slow with alpha sorting and transparency, so the cost is not low at all, its very high.
This is plain fact and there is currently no workaround
each level of sorting reduces the FPS by about 20 percent because the entire scene gets re drawn
Again the only 'cheap' alpha blending is unlit
aggh i did n't even say vertex alpha would be viable as a solution, I said 'alpha blending' or 1 bit alpha which are both slow as hell in next gen .
nextgen shaders have components like alpha, specular, normal map, transmission etc, so you can't just ditch the alpha component and hope to get nice looking traansparency.
Lenn did you read any of the above posts at all?
BTW the render monkey example uses alpha blend masks as well as the anisotropic component and the hair mesh is more than 6000 polys
They are both very, very slow with alpha sorting and transparency, so the cost is not low at all, its very high.
This is plain fact and there is currently no workaround
each level of sorting reduces the FPS by about 20 percent because the entire scene gets re drawn
Again the only 'cheap' alpha blending is unlit
aggh i did n't even say vertex alpha would be viable as a solution, I said 'alpha blending' or 1 bit alpha which are both slow as hell in next gen .
nextgen shaders have components like alpha, specular, normal map, transmission etc, so you can't just ditch the alpha component and hope to get nice looking traansparency.
Lenn did you read any of the above posts at all?
BTW the render monkey example uses alpha blend masks as well as the anisotropic component and the hair mesh is more than 6000 polys