I have the following situation:
I got geomtries in three categories. Applet, Overlay and Exclusive.
I want to make sure that the next category is always rendered on top of the previous, and I want to make sure that the overlayed geometries are blocking the renderpicking. I have to make sure that they are in that specific order without having to keep this in mind when developing the geometries. This also is in regard to scaling and the like. A Applet component should never be rendered on top of an overlay, no matter the Scaling or Z-Translate.
I hoped the following might work:
But it seems like the Renderpass looses the information that is needed for the renderpick to get the information when in a later-element from the line.
The only solution I came up with would be to use three renderpicks, but then the blocking would not work any longer, so this also seems to be a no go.
Is there any way this might work or do I have to rethink to concept?
Render Pick can only know about the geometry in the Render it’s looking at. Everything else is just colors in a buffer at that point, and there is no picking information left. One thing you can do is manually setup your geometries into 3 top-level Geometry COMP that you set their Draw Priority for. Then you also use a Rectangle SOP and a Depth MAT to overwrite the depth values between each top-level Geometry COMP, so that the depth from the first group is ignored for the second group.
That what I was affraid of. I would love to limit manual setup to a complete minimum.
The setup with three TOP-Level GEOs def. is one way to go, with the only issue that this requires the mount of the UI GEO to also be a GEO-Component, which is possible, but would polute the rest of the setup substantialy, as the “mountingpoint” would also hold the logic. But I have the feeling there is no way arround this for the moment.
But now I’m wondering, would it be technicaly be possible to create a selectGeoCOMP? (I think this would solve the issue too…)
Tackling this again and having a hard time getting the result.
Wondering, what exactly the draw-prioritie is there for? It makes no difference if I set the draw-priorities to different values or not, the rendering still takes the depth in to consideration. Is this where the depth-material would come in to play? Placing a rectangle just results in the APPLET ui being cut off instead.
EDIT: The docs state that Smaller values get drawn over the ones with larger values, but even chaing this arround does not help.
The clock would be supposed to be always on TOP.
And this is the expression to get the geometries:
The Depth Test will always take precedent for which pixels end up being shown, unless you turn it off. Draw Priority is primarily used for color blending. When drawing things with blending (such as transparency), the colors of the pixels farther back need to have already been written to the color buffer, so the incoming pixels (which pass the depth test and overwrite the current colors), and use the existing colors as a blend component and incorporate them into the final color. Without draw priority the closer object may be drawn first, and then when the farther object is drawn it just gets discarded by the depth test right away, and no blending occurs.
I see. I was little confused by this part in the parenthesis:
Draw Priority drawpriority - Determines the order in which the Components are drawn. Smaller values get drawn after (on top of) larger values.
So, is there any way to disable the whole depth-spiel without having to touch all the materials of the rendered geometries and instead use the draw-priority?
Ah thanks, I’ve updated the help a bit to make it more clear.
You should be able to use a Constant MAT as an Override Material (Advanced page) for your render, and turn off the depth test for that MAT. That would be the only potential way to do that globally.
Things can break down quickly in your render though, as objects behind other objects will be the ones getting picked if you have any mistakes in your draw order.
