Adjusting the properties in the Inspector

Use the options in the Inspector to make small changes to the material.

Parameters

Under Parameters the premade patch asset material has one color Input that can be edited.

When more inputs have been added to a patch asset material in the Patch Editor they will also be listed here.

Input

Any Color outputs the patch asset material has will be listed here.

Render Options

Blend mode

Sets the blend mode of the material. Choose from:

• Add
• Alpha
• Subtract
• Multiply
• Replace
• Screen

Cull Mode

Back - Discard pieces of the mesh that are facing away from the viewer. Most effects use this mode to improve performance.

Front - Discard pieces of the mesh that are facing the viewer.

Opacity

Sets the transparency of the material on an individual map level.

Double Sided

Displays both sides of a face normal.

Advanced Render Options

Use the Write to Depth Buffer and Use Depth Test checkboxes to control certain order parameters for the object the material is applied to.

Customizing the premade patch asset material

Drag the patch group into the Patch Editor to edit it:

The Input

The group has one Input port on the left of the patch. This is a color defined by connecting other patches to it to create a more complex visual shader, or by adjusting the Input value in the Inspector.

Outputs

It has 2 output ports:

• Color outputs an RGBA color.
• Position outputs a vector4 position.

Expanding the patch asset

Expand the patch asset to edit and customize it. You’ll see it’s made of 2 graphs. One graph affects the Color output, and the other can be used to set a vertex position.

The color graph

This graph uses a Vertex Attribute and Swizzle patch to convert the local normal XYZ values to RGB color. A Mix patch combines this with the input color by the amount specified in the Alpha value:

The vertex position graph

This graph conforms the object's local vertex positions to the screen space of the camera, outputting a matrix signal that controls the object’s vertex positions:

Edit this by adding your own offsets to these signals either uniformly through vectors or through additional matrices.

Adding inputs and outputs

To make patch asset materials customizable through the Inspector, add inputs to the patch asset.

To add an input or output:

1. Right-click on the patch asset.
2. Select Edit Properties.

The following options will appear:

To add inputs or outputs, either:

• Click + next to Outputs to add outputs.
• Click + next to Inputs to add inputs.

When you’ve added the inputs and outputs you need, create a new patch asset.

To create a new asset:

1. Return to the Patch Editor.
2. Right-click the patch asset.
3. Select Convert to Patch Group.

Example

In this project we’ve added a second color and animation by editing the premade patch asset material:

We did this by editing both the color and position graphs. We added:

1. A second color input to the color graph - the two color inputs will be listed and can be edited in the Inspector.
2. Two new inputs to the position graph, represented in the Inspector as Duration and Strength.

The Color 2 input adds a second color. We changed the Vertex Attribute patch to output Texture Coordinates.

The position graph

The Duration inputs allows us to set the Duration value in the Loop Animation patch to set the speed of the animation.

The Strength input lets us edit the strength of the vertex displacement by defining how much the normals should be multiplied by and adding this to the position.