Tim Greenberg, known online as passivestar, whom we had the opportunity to speak with a few years ago, explored the newly introduced stencil support in Godot Engine 4.5. This addition essentially opens the door to more effects, such as X-ray, outlines, cutouts, and selective post-processing for specific objects. In AAA games, stencils are often used for this latter purpose in deferred rendering, where not everything can be handled within surface shaders.
The developer shared some details about this demo, explaining that it’s a single scene where doorway planes write to stencil 1 and 2, and materials read from these as needed, along with some manual sorting. No custom shaders are used.
He also mentioned that Godot Engine 4.6 might introduce native support for glTF GPU instancing. Additionally, Emilio Coppola from the Godot Foundation was seen announcing that passivestar’s theme will become the default one in version 4.6:
