Z-index, or arranging elements in Stride

[guest]

Hi, I tried to look up all things Z-index and compositing (including NODE20 workshop, forum, this chat, compositing help patch), and still can’t figure out how to make sure various elements are in the right Z-order.

My patch is made up of stride layers - in spectral groups or by themselves, text → skia renderer → render entities, elementa elements. In vvvv beta, this would be done by pin order. In VL, how to do this? Is there something like a Z-index that can work?

I’m trying also to bring to front one of the stride layers that is part of a spectral group of stride layers, wondering how to do this, as well as ensure elementa+text elements are on top when everything leads to a Root Scene → Scene Window.

I’ve attached a patch, that demonstrates this. No prob if no answers for everything but any guidance will be useful!

arranging and compositing items in stride - problem.vl (84.3 KB)

[tonfilm]

Just make sure you use only one RenderEntity and use Group and Group (Spectral) from the Rendering category to order the Renderers. The IRenderer links do draw the order in which they are connected. This is the same as the DX11 layer in beta.

The entity scene graph is a high-level system and the draw order doesn’t correspond to the order of the entities. The draw order of the entities gets optimized by the render system for performance.