Cameras, materials and effects

Everything on this page draws: it runs on the players' games, where the world is rendered. The server renders nothing and refuses these calls: mark these scripts [ClientOnly].

Materials#

A Material is a material of your world: a field set from the scene, or renderer.sharedMaterial. Changing it changes every renderer that uses it.

using NodeWorld.Flux;

namespace MyWorld
{
    [ClientOnly]
    public class Glow : FluxScript
    {
        public Material neon;

        protected override void Update()
        {
            var pulse = 0.5f + 0.5f * Mathf.Sin(Time.time * 4f);
            neon.SetColor("_EmissionColor", Color.cyan * (2f * pulse));
        }
    }
}

Textures come from fields (Texture, Sprite), from images loaded from the web, from render textures and from data textures.

Cameras and render textures#

A camera of your scene keeps its settings, but the game turns it off: the player's view is the game's. To render something else (a mirror, a security screen, a portal view), a script makes its own camera and renders it into a texture:

[ClientOnly]
public class SecurityCamera : FluxScript
{
    public Renderer screen;
    private Camera _camera;
    private RenderTexture _texture;

    protected override void Start()
    {
        _texture = RenderTexture.Create(512, 512);
        _camera = Camera.Create();
        _camera.targetTexture = _texture;
        _camera.transform.SetPositionAndRotation(transform.position, transform.rotation);
        screen.SetTexture("_BaseMap", _texture);
    }

    protected override void LateUpdate() => _camera.Render();
}

• Camera.Create() makes a camera of your world, off: it renders only when the script calls Render(), into its targetTexture. Turning it on is refused (A camera created by a script only renders when the script calls Render.).
• Its settings: cullingMask, clearFlags and backgroundColor, fieldOfView, aspect, nearClipPlane, farClipPlane, worldToCameraMatrix, projectionMatrix, CalculateObliqueMatrix, useOcclusionCulling, and showLocalPlayerHead (the local player's head, hidden from their own eyes, shows in a mirror).
• Camera.main is the player's camera (the eyes in VR): read its pose, stereoEnabled, GetStereoViewMatrix(eye) and GetStereoProjectionMatrix(eye) to render one image per eye.
• RenderTexture.Create(width, height, depthBits, hdr) and Release(). A render texture goes to a renderer (SetTexture) or to every shader (Shader.SetGlobalTexture).

The mirror of the example world is a complete camera script.

Data textures#

DataTexture.Create(width, height) (1 to 1024 texels a side) is a small texture of floats your script writes: SetPixels(rgba) takes width × height × 4 floats (r, g, b, a), row by row from y = 0. Give it to your shaders with Shader.SetGlobalTexture: Pulse hands the music to shaders this way. Release() frees it.

Lights, particles, animation#

For many objects at once, see object batches and drawing by instances; for meshes, meshes made by scripts.