Question Transparency sorting issue with custom shader

Hi!
Disclaimer: I'm a complete noob at shaders, please be patient with me!

I've been using Keijiro's Point Cloud Renderer on Github to render point clouds, and it's working well.
However, these points (using both the disk and point shaders) do not interact correctly with other, transparent objects in the scene. Even just a simple box with the standard shader set to Transparent rendering mode looks wrong - the points are always in front of the object, even though they are on the same layer.


Can you tell which points are inside or behind the box?

I realize this is likely to do with how the shader is written but I have no idea where to start.
I tried messing around with the SubShader's Queue and RenderType tags to no avail.
Please help me figure out what I should be doing!

The shaders can be found here, I'm using the Disk one.

Thanks!

 

Not actually a problem with shaders at all. It's a problem with how Keijiro is rendering the point cloud. That project renders the point cloud using

OnRenderObject()

, which renders after the rest of the scene has rendered. This means it'll render on top of any transparent objects since for transparency sorting to work properly opaque objects need to render before the transparent ones, and the transparent objects need to be sorted prior to rendering.

To fix this you'd need to modify the c# code to use a command buffer that uses

CameraEvent.AfterForwardOpaque

instead of

Graphics.DrawProceduralNow()

.

 

THANK YOU! That pointed me in the right direction, I didn't even think the issue was with the renderer rather than the shader itself. I've changed the the code to use the CommandBuffers API and it works!
Interesting thing is, it's still using OnRenderObject. I've seen examples using OnWillRenderObject for this pipeline, but that never gets called in my case. Still, it works, so I've got no complaints. Thanks again!

 

For a command buffer with static data, you really just need to add it to the camera once in an OnEnable() and you're done. The only reason to do anything more than that is you want to stop rendering it, in which case you'd want to remove it from the camera.

If you're calling

camera.AddCommandBuffer()

every

OnRenderObject()

you're going to have a bad time.

 

You're definitely right, but unfortunately my data isn't static and needs to be updated every frame, so I have to remove and re-add the command buffer on each

OnRenderObject()

call.

 

Hi,

I'd be interested in the PointCloudRenderer script you've modified, I can't get it to render transparency properly still...

Thanks,

Jean