How to tell the engine to load textures underneath blocks with alpha

[Nesh108]

I have been playing around with the testbed and found the leaf.png, which is supposed to represent the leaves for a tree. I tried applying it to the ground and this was the result:

It looks like the engine loads only 1 level of blocks (probably for optimization) but that fails when the block hasAlpha: true.

[fenomas]

Hi,

I think two separate properties are overlapping here. When you register a material, you specify a hasAlpha to tell whether that material's should have transparency. The engine only uses this for deciding what kind of (babylon) material to create.

Separate from that, when you register a block type you specify whether it's opaque. This is the setting that determines whether stuff underneath the block gets culled at the meshing stage. From looking at the image, I think all you need to do is make the leaf blocks not [edited] opaque, and it'll do what you expected.

(Note that blocks also have a property solid - this one is for physics, and has nothing to do with rendering.)

Let me know if this works!

[Nesh108]

I will try now. But yeah, I was a bit confused with the difference between opaque, solid and so forth.

So:

• Opaque: is whether you can see through it or not
• Solid: is whether you can go through it or not
• Fluid: is basically the opposite of solid (but will be extended when we implement the fluid functionality)

Correct?

If so, shouldn't the leaf not be opaque?

[fenomas]

Yes, you have it right, and the leafs should not be opaque (that was a typo 😬 ).

Basically they're all really single-purpose properties. I mean, it probably won't make any sense to have a block that's fluid but solid, or that's opaque but has alpha, but the engine looks as each property in different ways so I have them all separate for now.

[Nesh108]

Sweet, I just set opaque: !hasAlpha and that works like a charm!