Hi,

First of all, thanks for your help previously with my earlier navigating-a-sphere questions.  I got it to work, the help I got from Egon and others on this board was very useful!

So, now I am playing around with .3ds models, and I loaded some low-poly trees into my world. they consist of a half-dozen or so quads, with an alpha 'leaf' texture applied to them (so only the leafy part shows), and a trunk, which is another low-poly mesh but with a standard, non-alpha texture applied to it.

To this point I have been using a variant of the model loader code from the JPCT wiki, that loads the sub-objects of the .3ds file and merges them into one Object3D.    The problem I've been having is that the leaves on the tree have z-ordering issues, where they pop in front of and in back of the tree trunks as you change camera perspective etc.  I have tried various values for sort depth and transparency, but since both the leaves and trunk are merged into a single object, I don't think it really solves the problem.

I suspect I might need to keep the leaves and trunk as separate objects, and apply different sort depths and transparency settings to each, but I wanted to see what people thought.  If I do that, it will double the number of tree-related objects, I don't know if that has a perf impact if there are a large number of trees.   I assume if I did that, I'd make one the child of the other or something so rotations/translations will move everything together ? (sorry,  im a bit of a newbie to 3D engine mechanics)

  I'm also assuming that I can't get away with setting sort order and transparency on the sub-objects before I merge them (ie, an Object3D can only have one value for each of these attributes.)  Along those lines, if there is some other kind of thing I should experiment with on the merged object to get my leaves to settle down, I'm interested! :-)

Thanks!