rendering transparent meshes in LibGDX

Question

Building open this tutorial - https://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/ProjectionViewportCamera I have constructed a class for generating polygon meshes. But i cannot figure out how to render semi transparency, even though the mesh in the tutorial takes a color object with an alpha channel.

I am rendering with squareMesh.render(GL10.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4); This is the code used for initializing the mesh

if (squareMesh == null) {
    squareMesh = new Mesh(true, 4, 4, 
                 new VertexAttribute(Usage.Position,    3, "a_position"),
                 new VertexAttribute(Usage.ColorPacked, 4, "a_color"));

    squareMesh.setVertices(new float[] {
        -0.5f, -0.5f, 0, Color.toFloatBits(128, 0, 0, 255),
         0.5f, -0.5f, 0, Color.toFloatBits(192, 0, 0, 255),
        -0.5f,  0.5f, 0, Color.toFloatBits(192, 0, 0, 255),
         0.5f,  0.5f, 0, Color.toFloatBits(255, 0, 0, 255) });   
    squareMesh.setIndices(new short[] { 0, 1, 2, 3});
}

Answer 1

In Color.toFloatBits(128, 0, 0, 255), the "255" is the alpha channel (where 255 means completely opaque and 0 means completely transparent = invisible).
Make sure you've enabled transparency in OpenGL with

Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND);
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);

to disable transparency again, simple use Gdx.gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_BLEND);

Answer 2

I found that ModelBatch.begin(...) will disable Blending by calling Gdx.gl.glDisable(GL20.GL_BLEND). So make sure to enable blending AFTER calling ModelBatch.begin().

modelBatch.begin(camera); // resets Blending to false
// enable Blending
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_BLEND);
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL20.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
// draw mesh
mesh.render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
modelBatch.end();