Is there any way to make front face of gluCylinder() transparent? - opengl

Question

I am using gluCylinder() to create a cylinder in openGL and then plotting points inside the cylinder with Depth Test On .
When i see the front view of the cylinder, the points inside the cylinder are obstructed by front face.
To make front face of the cylinder translucent i am using Blending.
I am using below functions.
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA)
But whatever coloring or alpha value i assign to the cylinder the front face is not looking transparent due to its back face.
Tell whether it is possible to do with blending only or else i need to introduce lighting for both the faces of Cylinder.Here it clearly visible the change in the color of front face and back face of cylinder. And the points inside the cylinder are not visible due to being obstructed by front face of cylinder.

Answer 1

You should be able to accomplish this by drawing the cylinder twice, while culling the front faces the first time, and culling the back faces the second time. This way, you can draw the front and back parts differently, e.g. by making the front part transparent.
The code sequence could look like this:
// Draw back part of cylinder, opaque.
glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);
glCullFace(GL_FRONT);
gluCylinder(...);
// Draw points.
// Draw front part of cylinder, transparent.
glCullFace(GL_BACK);
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
gluCylinder(...);
glDisable(GL_BLEND);

Answer 2

If I understand you right then no, you can't do it with blending alone.
If the cylinder's normals all point outward then you also won't be able to see the cylinder's internal parts no matter what you do.
I do something similar to show characters behind walls and it goes like this - render your scene normally and save it all to a framebuffer. Then render what you want shown behind with the buffer contents on top, using a custom shader to make a bubble of transparency around the thing you want shown behind.
Not sure if I am explaining it well or not but it unfortunately requires multiple steps to get the results you want.

Answer 3

Your problem is still a bit unclear to me despite the image but I will attempt to answer based on my perception of your issue.
You are drawing a cylinder and have geometry (lines or other models) inside the cylinder. You want the cylinder to look translucent so the inner objects are visible. Here is one way to do it. Assuming your render functions are drawCylinder() and drawPoints().
init()
{
...
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
...
}
drawScene()
{
glDepthMask(GL_FALSE);
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
drawCylinder();
glDisable(GL_BLEND);
glDepthMask(GL_TRUE);
drawPoints();
}
doing so will make sure that the points are drawn regardless of the cylinder. Try using lower values of alpha for your cylinder color.
Please note this is one way to do it. I suggest using shaders to have more control over blending as well as exploring fragment/pixel discard options.