3D Picture - How to set triangle mesh transparency

[Tomi Maila]

Hey,

Now that I've got the alpha version of Active VI Toolkit released, I've had some time to do some real work once again So I started to play around with LabVIEW 3D picture control released with LabVIEW 8.2, although I'm using it with LV 8.5. I'm trying to get two colored 3D triangle meshes to be displayed one top of another so that the lower mesh would be visible trough the upper mesh. If I understood the 3D picture control documentation correctly, setting the alpha value of a triangle color to below 1.0 should set the primitive to be partially transparent. However this is not what I've experienced with my simple test code.

Does anyone have any experience on transparency with 3d picture control? How does one achieve partially transparent surfaces? An example VI (LV 8.2) is attached that presents the failing method I'm using.

Cheers,

Tomi

[Adnan]

Hi,

You must set SceneObject.Blending.Mode to ON.

[HeLo]

Hi,

although it works this way, it is not working as expected:

I have put another transparent, green triangle in between the two existing, observing that you can see through both blue and green only, if the green triangle is added to the scene before the blue.

Then I checked and tried to see through both from behind. Looking from behind however, transparency is lost.

Transparency thus seems to be implemented as an optical diode - not what you normally observe in nature.

Herbert

[Tomi Maila]

Herbert,

I found that setting both SceneObject.Blending.Mode to On and SceneObject.Bending.Bin to Transparent Bin for the parent scene object will render all the three triangles correctly irrespective of the order in which they are added.

I attatch the VI for LV 8.5 as well.