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• Environment – drawn first. Commonly used for the skybox.

• Opaque – opaque meshes are drawn front to back so we can leverage depth testing and have less overdraw.

• Fur – fur meshes are very peculiar, they have instanced meshes, where the first layer is opaque and the rest are transparent or blended. Meshes rendered through this queue are sorted back to front.

• Alpha Test – rendered back to front, pixels under a certain alpha value are discarded. This is a more efficient way of adding transparent surfaces.

• Blended – transparent meshes, rendered back to front.

• Overlay – reserved for UI

Shadows

Animaze rendered surface can cast and receive shadows, both processes being independent from each other.

Casting shadows makes the rendered surface be rendered through a shadow pass, building up a shadow map. Receiving shadows makes the Animaze Shader map the already rendered shadow map.

All three numerical values are used to get rid of the shadow mapping artifacts.

Slope bias factor - scale factor that is used to create a variable depth offset for each polygon when rendering the shadow map

Slope bias units - constant depth offset when rendering the shadow map;

Depth bias- screen space value that is used to offset the object depth before comparing it to the shadow map value.

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Additional components can be added to a selected mesh within the Animaze Editor:

Specular Normal Mapping – an extra normal map to be used instead of the regular one when computing reflection and specular, usually used for eyes meshes.

Static Color – a color component which overrides any other color texture on that mesh; usually useful for particle systems.

Texture Alterator – basically a gradient color mask used for dilation of the pupil which can be fed by animation data. In order to attain this, you must have a unique mapping for the eye, placed in its center. The mask with full intensity (white) must have the size of the pupil, while the gradient from white to black must have the size of the iris.