diablodale

I've discovered an errant behavior when using shaders on gl objects (e.g. jit.gl.gridshape). A shader that you shipped with max, mat.glass.jxs, fails to have a transparent affect. No known workaround.

Repro happens 100% of the time. And on two different machine; each machine with different graphics cards. I don't think the shader is the issue because I can manually hack it to work once. Repro patcher is below.

Windows 7 Ultimate sp1 x64 with all current windows updates

click the 2nd messagebox to apply the shader to the gridobject

No transparency. You cannot see the whole torus. No known workaround.

You should be able to see the whole torus through the transparent plane. And that torus which is partially obstructed should have a color change due to the transparency in front of it.

Doubleclick to edit the bottom gridshape and edit something to cause it to be reinstantiated. Only after doing that, will the whole torus be visible. Very unusual. Unfortunately, its not possible for me to do this kind of instantiation hack as a workaround in my projects (gl.multiples, poly~, etc.)

Setup
Max 5.1.9
Windows 7 Ultimate sp1 x64 with all current windows updates

Steps:
open the patcher below.
click the messagebox to load the shader
click the 2nd messagebox to apply the shader to the gridobject
Result:
No transparency. You cannot see the whole torus. No known workaround.

Expected:
You should be able to see the whole torus through the transparent plane. And that torus which is partially obstructed should have a color change due to the transparency in front of it.

Note:
Doubleclick to edit the bottom gridshape and edit something to cause it to be reinstantiated. Only after doing that, will the whole torus be visible. Very unusual. Unfortunately, its not possible for me to do this kind of instantiation hack as a workaround in my projects (gl.multiples, poly~, etc.)

shader-transparency-fails-with-shader-shipping-in-max-ideas-for-workaround

I was able to resolve this by setting the @layer attribute on the transparent object to 1.

I think this is related to depth culling and OpenGL needing to have everything rendered in its buffer before it tackles these transperancies. Putting a higher layer number forces them to be rendered after other objects.

shader transparency fails with shader shipping in Max, ideas for workaround?