Byte Engine Docs

Use material assets to turn authored material and shader declarations into runtime resources for a render model.

Declare a material

Declare a material in JSON with its material type, shader references, and variables:

{
	"domain":"World",
	"type": "Surface",
	"shaders": {
		"Fragment": "../.."
	},
	"variables": [
		{
			"name":"color",
			"data_type": "vec4f",
			"value":"Purple",
			"type":"Static"
		}
	]
}

Declare a material variant

A material variant can inherit from a parent material and replace values for variables that the parent declares:

{
	"parent":"material",
	"variables": [
		{
			"name": "color",
			"value": "Red"
		}
	]
}

When variants share shader code, Byte Engine can use one pipeline with different per-instance values.

Do not depend on this optimization. Byte Engine can create additional shader or pipeline variants when static replacement produces better runtime code.

Load and process materials

When you request a material, Byte Engine loads the material or variant and its shader dependencies before processing begins.

Processing produces the shader code and metadata that a render model needs at runtime.

flowchart TD

ma ---> Materials --> Shaders

subgraph Materials
Material
end

subgraph Shaders
Vertex
Fragment
...
end

shader_manager[[Shader Manager]]

Materials ---> shader_manager
Shaders ---> shader_manager

render_model_a[Visibility]
render_model_b[Forward]

shader_manager ---> render_model_a
shader_manager ---> render_model_b

subgraph Resources
	subgraph resources.materials[Materials]
		Material
	end

	subgraph resource.shaders[Shaders]
	Compute
	end
end

render_model_a ---> Resources

Each generated material identifies its render model:

{
	"name":"material",
	"model": {
		"name":"Visibility",
		"pass":"MaterialEvaluation",
	},
	"variables": [
		{
			"name": "color",
			"type": "Static",
			"data_type": "vec4f",
			"value": "Purple",
		}
	]
	...
}

Byte Engine also extracts variable definitions from shader code.

Shader generation details not available

The documentation doesn't yet explain how Byte Engine converts declarations into render-model-specific shader code and metadata.

For the supported declaration format, continue to the .bema file guide.

Material assets

Declare a material

Declare a material variant

Load and process materials

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