Using alpha maps to discard pixels

To create the effect of an object that has holes, we could use a texture with an appropriate alpha channel that contains information about the transparent parts of the object. However, that requires us to make sure to make the depth buffer read-only, and render all of our polygons from back to front in order to avoid blending problems. We would need to sort our polygons based on the camera position and then render them in the correct order. What a pain!

With GLSL shaders, we can avoid all of this by using the discard keyword to completely discard fragments when the alpha value of the texture map is below a certain value. By completely discarding the fragments, there's no need to modify the depth buffer because when discarded, they aren't evaluated against the depth buffer at all. We don't need to depth-sort our polygons because there is no blending.

The following image on the right shows the teapot with fragments discarded based upon the texture on the left...