How to hide a material/submesh completly

[JonVarner]

Hey all,

I am trying to get hide a material (PBR) using alpha=0. However, a problem arises with the reflections on the material still being present. I can of course set reflectivity to 0, but it seemed that there might be a better way to simply show/change visibility of a material/submesh?

[Nodragem]

If the material is attached to a submesh, maybe you can turn submesh.isVisible to false ?

[JonVarner]

Thanks yeah, I was hoping it was going to be that easy as well. But I tried it to no effect and I don't see it as a property when I query the submesh.

 

 

[Nodragem]

is not the submesh of type BABYLON.Mesh?

However, I do think that alpha=0 should be hiding the reflections too ideally; that makes sense to me; should we consider that as a bug?

[JonVarner]

I am actually beginning to think that too. For the most part setting alpha to 0 seems to be removing most of the reflections. Here is a screen shot of what I am looking at. You have to look closely at the top of the image and you can see what looks like a "ghost" of the original material.

I am looping through all of the materials and setting:

shader.alpha = 0

 

[JonVarner]

Ok so it does seem to be a bug of some sort. By setting alpha to 0 it seems that all of the properties are no longer present except environmentIntensity which remains present even if alpha is set to 0. In the end I just used:

shader.alpha = 0
shader.environmentIntensity = 0

 

[Guest]

Adding @Sebavan

[Guest]

what you can do is just remove the submesh from the mesh.submeshes array

[Sebavan]

It is actually a feature ?

This is meant to simulate the reflection of the light on a windshield for instance or the tv by night on a window.

To disable it you can set useSpecularOverAlpha to false as well as useRadianceOverAlpha to false.

Else as you noticed, you could drop the environment intensity with the alpha if you need to fade smoothly.