Materials
Materials define how a surface looks: color, roughness, metalness, normals and emission. Hyperion uses a standard PBR model.
Making one
In the Assets panel, hit New... › Material, then open it to edit. Materials are saved as .hmf files in your project's Materials/ folder.
Parameters
| Parameter | What it does |
|---|---|
| Albedo | The base color. White by default. |
| Roughness | 0 == perfect mirror, 1 == completely rough surface. As with most things in life, the truth lies somewhere in between. |
| Metalness | How metallic the surface is, generally you want 0 or 1 for this |
| Emissive | A color and an intensity, for things that glow. NOTE! This is not fully supported in the engine at this point, but lightmap baking will use this to treat a surface as somehting that emits light |
| Alpha threshold | Discards pixels for anything with alpha below this value |
| Transmission, IOR | For transparent materials like glass. IOR starts at 1.5. |
| UV scale | Scales how much the UV coordinates of your mesh repeat: if your textures are stretched across the surface, increase it; too much will cause visible tiling with your textures |
| Unlit | Skips lighting entirely |
Textures
The main slots are Diffuse, Normals, Roughness, Metalness, Ambient Occlusion and Parallax.
For packed textures (roughness, metalness and AO in one image), you can reuse the same texture in each slot and set which color/alpha channel each one reads for its specific value.
Buckets
Each material goes into a bucket, which allows the renderer to decide which pass it is included in as well as other behaviour
- Opaque: solid surfaces. What you'll want to use, most of the time.
- Translucent: transparent surfaces, drawn in a separate forward pass.
- Lightmapped: set automatically when you bake.
- Sky: Rendered after all others. You likely will not need to use this manually unless you are adding a custom skybox system or something
- Debug: DebugDrawer stuff - like in editor gizmos, selection boxes, terrain painting cursor, etc.
From code
MaterialAttributes attributes;
attributes.shaderName = NAME("GeometryPass");
Handle<Material> material = MakeHandle<Material>(NAME("CrateMaterial"), attributes);
material->SetTexture(MaterialTextureKey::Diffuse, crateTexture);
InitObject(material);