[Bug 1.1 Beta] Ground Cover rendering order and static meshes - RESOLVED
by Bryan Morgan · in Torque 3D Professional · 02/15/2010 (12:55 pm) · 8 replies
I just came across a particularly odd bug in that the ground cover billboards seem to have render order issues when there are static meshes in the background.
farm5.static.flickr.com/4043/4359826758_b6d336dda5_o.jpg
As you can see from the section of the image I've circled in red, even though the building is in the distance, the billboards which are on the hill in front of it render behind the building. I tried enabling the "Transparent Z-Write" option, but other then removing the visible z-fighting it had no effect as the billboard still renders behind the building which is supposed to be far behind it. Not sure if this problem existed prior to 1.1b as I've not used the ground cover object until just recently.
farm5.static.flickr.com/4043/4359826758_b6d336dda5_o.jpg
As you can see from the section of the image I've circled in red, even though the building is in the distance, the billboards which are on the hill in front of it render behind the building. I tried enabling the "Transparent Z-Write" option, but other then removing the visible z-fighting it had no effect as the billboard still renders behind the building which is supposed to be far behind it. Not sure if this problem existed prior to 1.1b as I've not used the ground cover object until just recently.
#2
02/15/2010 (3:16 pm)
Eew, stippled transparency. Thanks for the suggestion as the alpha threshold is certainly a method of getting around this problem, but the fact remains that there's still more fixing to be done for the render order when transparency is selected.
#3
02/15/2010 (7:00 pm)
In addition to the render order issue regarding static meshes there also seems to exist the same issue when trying to render in front of water.
#4
07/14/2010 (3:05 am)
Logged: TQA-567 
#5
09/02/2010 (3:43 pm)
This was fixed in 1.1 Beta 2. 
#6
09/03/2012 (2:23 pm)
Just FYI, this still exists in 1.2
#7
09/04/2012 (7:11 am)
I managed to fix this flicker-like behavior and render order issue by creating a new RenderInstType (still using RenderMeshMgr, named "GroundCover" to not collide with anything else) and moving it to be rendered right before Foliage.
#8
09/05/2012 (5:52 am)
A final followup: my solution did not in fact solve all the sorting issues that GroundCover in Torque 3D 1.2 has, so I ended up creating billboard-only meshes and adding my grass billboard DTSes to GroundCover. This seems to be correctly sorting and doesn't have any transparency issues either. 
Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]
As a workaround, don't use transparency types, use an alpharef setting (play with the slider)- depending on how the image is made you might get some unsightly edging.