class Material

A Material describes the surface of anything drawn on the graphics card! It is typically composed of a Shader, and shader properties like colors, textures, transparency info, etc.

Items drawn with the same Material can be batched together into a single, fast operation on the graphics card, so re-using materials can be extremely beneficial for performance!

Instance Fields and Properties

Instance Methods

Static Fields and Properties

Static Methods

Examples

Material parameter access

Material does have an array operator overload for setting shader parameters really quickly! You can do this with strings representing shader parameter names, or use the MatParamName enum for compile safety.

exampleMaterial[MatParamName.DiffuseTex] = gridTex;
exampleMaterial[MatParamName.TexScale  ] = 2.0f;

Assigning an array in a Shader

This is a bit of a hack until proper shader support for arrays arrives, but with a few C# marshalling tricks, we can assign array without too much trouble. Look for improvements to this in later versions of SteroKit.

// This struct matches a shader parameter of `float4 offsets[10];`
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
struct ShaderData
{
	[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 10)]
	public Vec4[] offsets;
}

Material arrayMaterial = null;
public void Initialize()
{
	ShaderData shaderData = new ShaderData();
	shaderData.offsets = new Vec4[10] {
		V.XYZW(0,0,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.2f,0,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.4f,0,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.4f,0.2f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.4f,0.4f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.4f,0.6f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0.2f,0.6f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0,0.6f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0,0.4f,0,0),
		V.XYZW(0,0.2f,0,0)};
	
	arrayMaterial = new Material(Shader.FromFile("shader_arrays.hlsl"));
	arrayMaterial[MatParamName.DiffuseTex] = Tex.FromFile("test.png");
	arrayMaterial.SetData<ShaderData>("offsets", shaderData);
}

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