Layered Weighted Blended Order-Independent Transparency

Fabian Friederichs, Elmar Eisemann, Martin Eisemann

Keywords: Order-independent transparency, rendering, rasterization

TL;DR: The paper describes a new technique for rasterization of semi-transparent surfaces that outperforms current state-of-the-art by an order of magnitude in terms of error reduction.

Abstract: Our approach improves the accuracy of weighted blended order-independent transparency, while remaining efficient and easy to implement. We extend the original algorithm to a layer-based approach, where the content of each layer is blended independently before compositing them globally. Hereby, we achieve a partial ordering but avoid explicit sorting of all elements. To ensure smooth transitions across layers, we introduce a new weighting function. Additionally, we propose several optimizations and demonstrate the method’s effectiveness on various challenging scenes in terms of geometric- and depth complexity. We achieve an error reduction more than an order of magnitude on average compared to weighted blended order-independent transparency for our test scenes.

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