So I have an instanced scene that is supposed to be the child of a colour rect in my tree. I want to randomly generate the nodes, but I also want parts of the view to be cut off if the texture no longer is above the main section. I know you can render nodes below their parents, but I don't know if stopping part of them from rendering is physically possible.
This is the node tree in the editor
Is there any way to do this directly, or am I gonna have to use a viewport of some variety?
I believe what you want is to set rect_clip_content to true on the ColorRect (or whatever Control). Making invisible any part of its children outside of it.
From Godot's documentation:
bool rect_clip_content
Enables whether rendering of CanvasItem based children should be clipped to this control's rectangle. If true, parts of a child which would be visibly outside of this control's rectangle will not be rendered.
If what you want is the opposite, perhaps you can use z_index to have something render on top, occluding the parts you don't want visible.
There is also a trick you can use with lights (including 2D lights):
light_mode of the material to "Light Only". You could also do it with a custom shader instead.Making something disappear with light, in 2D, is impossible. In 3D, you can use flags_use_shadow_to_opacity. That is how you make a shadow catcher.
But, there is one more trick: you can use a mask. This should give you full control of when to show or hide things. So, if none of the above solutions works for you, use a mask. I have an explanation in a different answer. See also: How to crop sprite in a non-rectangular form?.
Mighty Mochi Games recently (2022-03-30) made a compilation of the different approaches in video form: Mask Methods Collection - Godot 3.x - 2D .