As an experiment, I'm trying to create a Viewport of a 3D scene, to be rendered on a ViewportTexture, which will be displayed in a 2D scene. (Specifically, it'll be displayed as a scene tile that's part of a TileSet.)
As of yet, it works fine. (In the graphic, that's a 3D torus at the center left, in the red area, and it's animating. Great so far.)
However, the background is imprinting over anything I have in a lower tile layer. This is not good, it limits me to a rectangular shape.
I attempt to set transparent_bg to true for the SubViewport, but after I do that, all 3D objects in the scene become transparent, not just the background. All that's left is the little microscopic Godot icon at the top left, which is a Sprite2D; the MeshInstance and the Sprite3D disappear. However, I can see the green tile that's placed beneath it.
Is this a bug in the program, or a bug in my understanding? It's version 4.1.
UPDATE: It seems that if I'm working with an ordinary 2D scene, without a TileMap, simply selecting "Transparent BG" works fine. Interesting.
OK, I seem to have figured it out. It was me.
I created a second scene, which had a Node2D root. Its children were, in order, a TextureRect2D set to a noise texture (just to test this as I work), a SubViewport with with a MeshInstance3D torus and a Camera3D as children, and then finally a TextureRect2D with a ViewportTexture, set to that SubViewport. The camera was of course aligned to look straight down at the MeshInstance3D.
The viewport's
transparent_bgwas toggled to on, and I can see the TextureRect2D right beneath it. Importing it as a scene tile worked fine, I can see the grassy green underneath the tile now.It seems likely that I may have messed up my blending mode somewhere in the old one, which is fine; apparently I don't really need to worry much about that.
I'm new to Godot, so I can't help you, but I just wanted to say how cool your approach sounds. I'm looking forward to knowing how to do that kind of thing, it sounds like you're mixing 2D and 3D in a clever way!
God, it works great. Read through the tutorial and it will give you an idea of just how powerful the tile editor is.
The only downside to scene types is that they are effectively instanced at every placement in the scene, so they're more demanding; but most of the time that's not that big a deal.
Cool that it works but why would one do such a thing.
I assume you could render 3D stuff over a 2D viewport? Not really understood your setup maybe this is exactly what you're doing.
I'm hacking together a demo game, and I can save enormous amounts of animation time if I can simply use an armature in the middle of my otherwise JRPG-like game. That way i don't have to worry about individual frames, and can almost go directly from Krita/Blender to Godot.
Scene tiles allow me to do that.
Later on, I can try replacing these with animated tiles selectively, if overhead becomes an issue.
I'll post a link when things start coming together!