Material Basics

Materials are the cornerstone of viewing content in 3d. Your scene can have many objects with geometry but if no materials are applied you will not see anything in your viewport. Materials get applied to Meshes. By default materials are of a specific color (white) but this can be customized in a variety of ways.

  1. // creates a cube to act as our geometryvar cube = new h3d.prim.Cube();// translate it so its center will be at the center of the cubecube.translate( -0.5, -0.5, -0.5);//Create a mesh out of our geometry - it has a default material applied.var mesh = new Mesh(cube, s3d);//Set the material color to Haxe orangemesh.material.color.setColor(0xEA8220);

As you can see the results are not terribly impressive. Things start to look better once we start working with lights. Continuing from the same code as above.

  1. //Add normals to our geometry so that the lighting can react to the facescube.addNormals();//Add a directional light to our scenevar light = new h3d.scene.DirLight(new h3d.Vector(0.5, 0.5, -0.5), s3d);

Textures

textures. To keep it simple, texture allow us to apply custom images to our geometry. Textures are resources that need to be loaded into your Heaps application. Once your textures are loaded they need to be added to materials and then applied to geometry. Using the geometry from our previous example lets take a look at how to use textures.

  1. // creates a cube to act as our geometryvar cube = new h3d.prim.Cube();// translate it so its center will be at the center of the cubecube.translate( -0.5, -0.5, -0.5);//Add normals and texture coordinates to our cube otherwise texture mapping won't workcube.addNormals();cube.addUVs();//get our image resource and convert it into a texturevar tex = hxd.Res.hxlogo.toTexture();// create a material with this texturevar mat = h3d.mat.Material.create(tex);//Create a mesh out of our geometry - and apply the material with the texture we just created to itvar mesh = new Mesh(prim,mat, s3d);//Add a directional light to our scenevar light = new h3d.scene.DirLight(new h3d.Vector(0.5, 0.5, -0.5), s3d);

Blend Modes

Materials can have blend modes applied to them to blend with the objects behind them. These are comparable to Photoshop blend modes. Changing blend modes on a material is straightforward. You simply access the .blendMode property of the material you want to change.

  1. mat.blendMode = h2d.BlendMode.Multiply;//Here are the currently supported blend modesenum BlendMode {    None;    Alpha;    Add;    SoftAdd;    Multiply;    Erase;    Screen;}

See Also

Lights Shadows PBR Materials Material (API)