Hi there,

I am currently trying to render nebulae in space. I have already managed to render the semi-transparency order-independent, but I'm stuck with the problem that when I render multiple axis-aligned planes, it looks like a grid when you look from a steep angle (see attached file).

Is there a way to fix this? I have to be able to move in space and into/within nebulae, so just rendering a sky dome is not possible I guess. Rendering spheres around the particles could be an option, but for this there is the problem that spheres overlap and therefore it may look bad, too.

Edit: I could multiply the transparency with the dot product of the plane normal and the normalized vector between the point on the plane and the camera. I will try this and tell you the results.

Edit 2: This looks better (see second attached file), but I still have maxima at the vertices because colors are interpolated...

If it were me I would use a post processing effect to render the nebula. You can apply a blur to soften things up and also use the depth map to smooth around objects(space ships or whatever).

Please, no blur! Could you not just raycasting ( Wolfenstein 3d) ? Spare GPU or CPU core to texture. There are so many sophisticated working nebulas with lightning, but raycasting is dead simple.