We know from Chapter 1 that colors in computer graphics commonly are made up of red, green, blue, and alpha channels. We’ve mostly focused on ways that we can work with the red, green and blue channels, and we’ve mostly ignored the alpha channel. This chapter is going to remedy that. We’re going to use the alpha channel to draw an entire scene’s worth of differently shaped objects, render everything from aliens to sun beams, and wrap up by animating a character. How exciting!
We’re going to start off by using the alpha channel of a texture to render something that isn’t rectangular on a ...
