2D Texture arrays?

Questions
1

Hi, I saw that Babylon supports WebGL2 and texture arrays, but I don’t see any related APIs. Is there any built-in way to make use of texture arrays, or is it necessary to write a custom shader?

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2

Hello @fenomas

Here are some of the resources in our documentation including a demo.

you are going to need a custom shader. We have some resources on the forums for this too. :smiley: Uv3 not working properly for 2d texture array

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3

Hi, I got pinged because my former question was linked.

I discovered your engine last year and was inspired to make my own. It uses 2d Texture arrays.

But anway…

From my experience you have to write a custom shader and set a custom attribute on the mesh.

You can check out what I did for DVE:

Texture Creator

Solid Mesh

Solid Material

Shader Builder

Some of the early releases have the shader in full if just want to copy it.

Thank you!

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4

Thanks for the answers! So I guess it’s fair to say that Babylon doesn’t prevent you from using texture arrays, but it doesn’t really support them in any usual sense.

@msDestiny14 If I can ask a follow-up, if one is currently using StandardMaterial, does Babylon have any relatively painless way of changing to a custom shader that derives from StandardMaterial with only small changes? Or do you basically need to create a shader from scratch that copies over every StandardMaterial feature that you intend to use?

@lucas-divinestar Wow that looks great! I will definitely follow your development. Personally I’ve been trying to go as far as I can with my engine without deeply becoming a shader person, since that’s a pretty big swamp to wade into…

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5

You can either use CustomMaterial instead of StandardMaterial if you want to reuse a StandardMaterial and add your custom code, or write a material plugin (new in 5.0 - see Customizing Materials: The Community Ninja Tale | by Babylon.js | Jan, 2022 | Medium for eg).

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Thank you. Like I said if I did not see your engine I would of probably not tried to make mine. And yours was used by Mojang which is awesome.
And I am not sure if anyone is gonna answer your question but I can.

As far as I know you do have to re-implement the features from the standard material.
For instance babylopn’s lights and fog will no longer work.
But they provide ways to add them back in.

I just copied the fog shader they provided. But that was the only built in effect from the standard material I wanted to use.

Also I got the against of working with shaders. I am not really a shader person either and they can be very frustrating when debugging. Though I found the work did pay off.

There may be stuff in Babylon 5.0 that I am un-aware that could help though.

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