Materials

Materials in Crown are resources with the .material extension. They define the shading (i.e. the visual appearance) of objects in the scene.

Some materials displayed in the Project Browser.

At the technical level, a material binds a shader together with its options and parameters (uniforms and samplers). For example, the built-in core/units/primitive material uses the shader named mesh and assigns values appropriate to primitive objects to all uniforms that shader exposes.

Creating Materials

Materials are normally created indirectly by the importers when you bring in external resources.

For instance:

• Importing a 3D scene automatically generates the required .material resources

• Importing sprites also produces associated material resources

You can also create standalone materials directly in the Level Editor:

1. Open the Project Browser

2. Right-click inside the target folder

3. Choose New Material...

4. Give it a unique name and confirm

Assigning Materials to Units

Materials are assigned to units through their rendering components. The Mesh Renderer component for example exposes a Material property.

The Material selector in the Mesh Renderer component.

Click the folder icon next to the material’s name to open the Material Chooser and pick the desired material from the list.

You can also assign materials programmatically at runtime via the RenderWorld Lua API.

Modifying Material properties

Once a material is assigned, you can modify its properties dynamically from Lua scripts using the Material API.