I was seeing a video on common tricks FPS games use, and one of them was having the weapon render on a higher and/or separate layer to avoid having it clip with other objects in the world. How would something like this be done in Godot?
If I remember correctly, you’re describing the draw order, which is typically a material setting in Godot. It’s been a while, though; you may need to dig a little.
You could also render in a viewpoint, and then apply that viewpoint to a full screen quad. It might have performance penalties, though; I’ve never profiled viewports.
This is a hack, but if nothing else you could check the “transparent” flag, but have basically 100% alpha. Things that are transparent have to draw last so they can be transparent over stuff.
Hmm… Though they probably still respect the Z-buffer…
Maybe try this, but it may not work.
As other commenters have said, the proper way of achieving this would be to set the materials of all relevant objects (i.e. those that should be occluded and the occluder) to transparent, which puts them in the transparency render pipeline which renders transparent objects in a back-to-front order. If you want your object to always be “on top”, you can set its sorting offset (in the VisualInstance3D group) to a high value. I’ve made a quick demo video illustrating what I am talking about:
(If the embed doesn’t work, the url is https://files.catbox.moe/b3zyiu.webm )
Edit: A “separate” layer, as you asked, could be achieved by doing what @bruce965@lemmy.ml suggested, although I’m not sure whether getting camera moves and lighting to match when drawing to different viewports is feasible.
There is a node that keeps cameras synchronized, I can’t recall the name right now, but it’s something like “RemotePosition3D”.
As for the lights, it’s a matter of configuring the layers correctly and disabling “own world” on the viewport.