16.5. Other Blending Effects

Another blending effect gradually causes an object to disappear over a sequence of frames. The control value could be used as the alpha value to cause the object to be drawn totally opaque (alpha is 1.0), totally invisible (alpha is 0), or partially visible (alpha is between 0 and 1.0).

You can also fade something in or out by using the discard keyword. The lattice shader described in Section 11.3 discards a specific percentage of pixels in the object each time it is drawn. You could vary this percentage from 0 to 1.0 to make the object appear, or vary from 1.0 to 0 to make the object disappear. Alternatively, you could evaluate a noise function at each location on the surface, and compare with this value instead. In this way, you can cause an object to erode or rust away over time.