Rendering semi-transparent objects in FireMonkey
The question has (predictably) popped up several times now, so here is a recapitulative post with workaround.
FireMonkey (as of now) doesn’t support rendering semi-transparent objects in 3D.
Delphi XE2 VCL Styles and 3D
…or when the old/new VCL mule shows it can still kick!
I was asked how hard it would be to do yet-another-Cover Flow-clone with VCL+GLScene, and how that would stand vs using FireMonkey on Windows.
FireMonkey’s TCube & Tessellation
If any of you had a look at FireMonkey’s TCube object, you might have noticed rendering it is quite slow and quite complex.
If you were curious enough to look at the code, you might have noticed that TCube is actually a static mesh made up of 452 vertices, 1440 indices and 480 triangles, instead of the 8 vertices and 6 quads (12 triangles) one could have expected.
A look at the 3D side of FireMonkey
This post was actually written sometime ago, alas XE2 Update 1 didn’t change much.
I’ve been looking at FireMonkey 3D side, by that I mean strictly the 3D side, not the UI components, or the 2D. Here are some observations, most born from maintaining and developing 3D software in C++ and later with GLScene, and with an eye to eventually porting some of GLScene code to FireMonkey (after all, most of GLScene’s code is actually linear algebra stuff, mesh manipulations, file format imports, etc. and not OpenGL-specific).
GLScene source code used in FireMonkey?
Dan Bartlett spotted some GLScene source code in FireMonkey, see this thread in the Embarcadero forum for details, parts of the VectorGeometry.pas, Spline.pas and raycasting code have been identified. The code having been incorporated in closed-source code (KSDev’s, Delphi XE2) it hadn’t been spotted or reported so far (at least to my knowledge).