for the sake of brevity, i’ve been looking at these nvidia sdk demos that envolve ‘depth peeling’ to mainly produce order indapendant transparency.
however i’m afraid the source is not exactly very intuitive for me, and the shader code is assembly inlined with nvparse, so i was hoping maybe i could capture a little bit of insight in here.
as well in the process of this investigation it became clear that shadow mapping is not what i thought it was, but rather utilizes depth maps. maybe ‘light mapping’ is the correct term for what i had in mind, which is just applying shadows directly in a texture. previously i had assumed that light and shadow mapping were the same, even though i had previously seen evidence which was beginning to cast doubts on my presumptions.
anyhow, i’m interested in order indapendant transparancy, how basicly it works, and how realistic is it for a complex scene.
could anyone ever see a day when a similar approach to order indapendant transparancy would be a ubiquitous hardware feature like antialiasing that could be turned off and on?
sincerely,
michael