Introduction
One of the topics we’ve handily avoided so far in our exploration of Metal is rendering of materials that are not opaque. In this post, we’ll explore a couple of related techniques for achieving transparency and translucency: alpha testing and alpha blending.
The sample scene for this post is a desert containing many palm trees and a few pools of water. The leaves of the palm trees consist of a few polygons each, textured with a partially-transparent texture, and the water is rendered as a translucent surface via alpha blending, which we’ll discuss in detail below.
