Breath of the wild rendering

[bold spire]

I was checking out breath of the wild to analyze the camera system, collisions etc, and realized that every objects in the world smoothly fade out when close to the camera.

Does that mean that all objects in the world just use a transparent shader all the time ?

From my understanding, transparent shaders are less optimized than opaque ones because they dont always write to the depth buffer (assuming its optimized to act like a normal opaque object when the alpha is 1, thats still an additional check to see if its 1 or not)

They are obviously using their own engine, so a different rendering pipeline. Do they have a way to dynamically switch between rendering as a transparent and opaque material ?

Switching between two materials completly sounds pretty unoptimized but maybe Im wrong, also that would mean making a secondary shader for each opaque shader to have a transparent variant..

Anyways just a random thought I had, how is it optimized, is it just not as bad as I think to only use transparent objects, etc

Also how would this be made in unity URP ?

Thanks !

[lusty laurel]

They actually fade using a technique called "dithering" which lets us keep the material opaque
Shader graph has a dither node that can be used with alpha clipping to re create the effect:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@13.1/manual/Dither-Node.html

Many games use this because changing a material to transparent will surely cause rendering issues and bugs so alpha clipping is a good alternative

[bold spire]

I know about fading with dithering, which is what I do in my game, maybe I didnt look closely enough, but it really looks just like a normal transparency fade ?

[lusty laurel]

If it is then it may be changing the object to transparent purely for the effect but a fast dither fade can often appear the same

Optimisation isnt really a concern, the rendering issues you get with transparent rendering is however (depth mainly)