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ShaderMaterial

A material rendered with custom shaders. A shader is a small program written in GLSL that runs on the GPU. You may want to use a custom shader if you need to:

  • implement an effect not included with any of the built-in materials
  • combine many objects into a single BufferGeometry in order to improve performance

There are the following notes to bear in mind when using a ShaderMaterial:

  • A ShaderMaterial will only be rendered properly by WebGLRenderer, since the GLSL code in the vertexShader and fragmentShader properties must be compiled and run on the GPU using WebGL.
  • As of THREE r72, directly assigning attributes in a ShaderMaterial is no longer supported. A BufferGeometry instance must be used instead, using BufferAttribute instances to define custom attributes.
  • As of THREE r77, WebGLRenderTarget or WebGLCubeRenderTarget instances are no longer supposed to be used as uniforms. Their texture property must be used instead.
  • Built in attributes and uniforms are passed to the shaders along with your code. If you don't want the WebGLProgram to add anything to your shader code, you can use RawShaderMaterial instead of this class.
  • You can use the directive #pragma unroll_loop_start and #pragma unroll_loop_end in order to unroll a for loop in GLSL by the shader preprocessor. The directive has to be placed right above the loop. The loop formatting has to correspond to a defined standard.
    • The loop has to be normalized.
    • The loop variable has to be i.
    • The value UNROLLED_LOOP_INDEX will be replaced with the explicitly value of i for the given iteration and can be used in preprocessor statements.
#pragma unroll_loop_start for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i ++ ) { // ... } #pragma
unroll_loop_end

Code Example​

const material = new THREE.ShaderMaterial( { uniforms: { time: { value: 1.0 },
resolution: { value: new THREE.Vector2() } }, vertexShader:
document.getElementById( 'vertexShader' ).textContent, fragmentShader:
document.getElementById( 'fragmentShader' ).textContent } );

Examples​

[example:webgl_buffergeometry_custom_attributes_particles webgl / buffergeometry / custom / attributes / particles]
[example:webgl_buffergeometry_selective_draw webgl / buffergeometry / selective / draw]
[example:webgl_custom_attributes webgl / custom / attributes]
[example:webgl_custom_attributes_lines webgl / custom / attributes / lines]
[example:webgl_custom_attributes_points webgl / custom / attributes / points]
[example:webgl_custom_attributes_points2 webgl / custom / attributes / points2]
[example:webgl_custom_attributes_points3 webgl / custom / attributes / points3]
[example:webgl_depth_texture webgl / depth / texture]
[example:webgl_gpgpu_birds webgl / gpgpu / birds]
[example:webgl_gpgpu_protoplanet webgl / gpgpu / protoplanet]
[example:webgl_gpgpu_water webgl / gpgpu / water]
[example:webgl_interactive_points webgl / interactive / points]
[example:webgl_video_kinect webgl / video / kinect]
[example:webgl_lights_hemisphere webgl / lights / hemisphere]
[example:webgl_marchingcubes webgl / marchingcubes]
[example:webgl_materials_envmaps webgl / materials / envmaps]
[example:webgl_materials_lightmap webgl / materials / lightmap]
[example:webgl_materials_wireframe webgl / materials / wireframe]
[example:webgl_modifier_tessellation webgl / modifier / tessellation]
[example:webgl_postprocessing_dof2 webgl / postprocessing / dof2]
[example:webgl_postprocessing_godrays webgl / postprocessing / godrays]

Vertex shaders and fragment shaders​

You can specify two different types of shaders for each material:

  • The vertex shader runs first; it receives attributes, calculates / manipulates the position of each individual vertex, and passes additional data (varyings) to the fragment shader.
  • The fragment ( or pixel ) shader runs second; it sets the color of each individual "fragment" (pixel) rendered to the screen.

There are three types of variables in shaders: uniforms, attributes, and varyings:

  • Uniforms are variables that have the same value for all vertices - lighting, fog, and shadow maps are examples of data that would be stored in uniforms. Uniforms can be accessed by both the vertex shader and the fragment shader.
  • Attributes are variables associated with each vertex---for instance, the vertex position, face normal, and vertex color are all examples of data that would be stored in attributes. Attributes can only be accessed within the vertex shader.
  • Varyings are variables that are passed from the vertex shader to the fragment shader. For each fragment, the value of each varying will be smoothly interpolated from the values of adjacent vertices.

Note that within the shader itself, uniforms and attributes act like constants; you can only modify their values by passing different values to the buffers from your JavaScript code.

Built-in attributes and uniforms​

The WebGLRenderer provides many attributes and uniforms to shaders by default; definitions of these variables are prepended to your fragmentShader and vertexShader code by the WebGLProgram when the shader is compiled; you don't need to declare them yourself. See WebGLProgram for details of these variables.

Some of these uniforms or attributes (e.g. those pertaining lighting, fog, etc.) require properties to be set on the material in order for WebGLRenderer to copy the appropriate values to the GPU - make sure to set these flags if you want to use these features in your own shader.

If you don't want WebGLProgram to add anything to your shader code, you can use RawShaderMaterial instead of this class.

Custom attributes and uniforms​

Both custom attributes and uniforms must be declared in your GLSL shader code (within vertexShader and/or fragmentShader). Custom uniforms must be defined in both the uniforms property of your ShaderMaterial, whereas any custom attributes must be defined via BufferAttribute instances. Note that varyings only need to be declared within the shader code (not within the material).

To declare a custom attribute, please reference the BufferGeometry page for an overview, and the BufferAttribute page for a detailed look at the BufferAttribute API.

When creating your attributes, each typed array that you create to hold your attribute's data must be a multiple of your data type's size. For example, if your attribute is a THREE.Vector3 type, and you have 3000 vertices in your BufferGeometry, your typed array value must be created with a length of 3000 * 3, or 9000 (one value per-component). A table of each data type's size is shown below for reference:

Attribute sizesGLSL typeJavaScript typeSize
floatNumber1
vec2THREE.Vector22
vec3THREE.Vector33
vec3THREE.Color3
vec4THREE.Vector44

Note that attribute buffers are not refreshed automatically when their values change. To update custom attributes, set the needsUpdate flag to true on the BufferAttribute of the geometry (see BufferGeometry for further details).

To declare a custom Uniform, use the uniforms property:

uniforms: { time: { value: 1.0 }, resolution: { value: new THREE.Vector2() } }

You're recommended to update custom Uniform values depending on object and camera in Object3D.onBeforeRender because Material can be shared among meshes, matrixWorld of Scene and Camera are updated in WebGLRenderer.render, and some effects render a scene with their own private cameras.

Constructor​

ShaderMaterial​

function ShaderMaterial( parameters: Object ): void;

parameters - (optional) an object with one or more properties defining the material's appearance. Any property of the material (including any property inherited from Material) can be passed in here.

Properties​

See the base Material class for common properties.

clipping​

clipping: Boolean;

Defines whether this material supports clipping; true to let the renderer pass the clippingPlanes uniform. Default is false.

defaultAttributeValues​

defaultAttributeValues: Object;

When the rendered geometry doesn't include these attributes but the material does, these default values will be passed to the shaders. This avoids errors when buffer data is missing.

this.defaultAttributeValues = { 'color': [ 1, 1, 1 ], 'uv': [ 0, 0 ], 'uv1': [
0, 0 ] };

defines​

defines: Object;

Defines custom constants using #define directives within the GLSL code for both the vertex shader and the fragment shader; each key/value pair yields another directive:

defines: { FOO: 15, BAR: true }

yields the lines

#define FOO 15 #define BAR true

in the GLSL code.

extensions​

extensions: Object;

An object with the following properties:

this.extensions = { derivatives: false, // set to use derivatives fragDepth:
false, // set to use fragment depth values drawBuffers: false, // set to use
draw buffers shaderTextureLOD: false // set to use shader texture LOD };

fog​

fog: Boolean;

Define whether the material color is affected by global fog settings; true to pass fog uniforms to the shader. Default is false.

fragmentShader​

fragmentShader: String;

Fragment shader GLSL code. This is the actual code for the shader. In the example above, the vertexShader and fragmentShader code is extracted from the DOM; it could be passed as a string directly or loaded via AJAX instead.

glslVersion​

glslVersion: String;

Defines the GLSL version of custom shader code. Only relevant for WebGL 2 in order to define whether to specify GLSL 3.0 or not. Valid values are THREE.GLSL1 or THREE.GLSL3. Default is null.

index0AttributeName​

index0AttributeName: String;

If set, this calls gl.bindAttribLocation to bind a generic vertex index to an attribute variable. Default is undefined.

isShaderMaterial​

isShaderMaterial: Boolean;

Read-only flag to check if a given object is of type ShaderMaterial.

lights​

lights: Boolean;

Defines whether this material uses lighting; true to pass uniform data related to lighting to this shader. Default is false.

linewidth​

linewidth: Float;

Controls wireframe thickness. Default is 1.

Due to limitations of the OpenGL Core Profile with the WebGL renderer on most platforms linewidth will always be 1 regardless of the set value.

flatShading​

flatShading: Boolean;

Define whether the material is rendered with flat shading. Default is false.

uniforms​

uniforms: Object;

An object of the form:

{ "uniform1": { value: 1.0 }, "uniform2": { value: 2 } }

specifying the uniforms to be passed to the shader code; keys are uniform names, values are definitions of the form

{ value: 1.0 }

where value is the value of the uniform. Names must match the name of the uniform, as defined in the GLSL code. Note that uniforms are refreshed on every frame, so updating the value of the uniform will immediately update the value available to the GLSL code.

uniformsNeedUpdate​

uniformsNeedUpdate: Boolean;

Can be used to force a uniform update while changing uniforms in Object3D.onBeforeRender(). Default is false.

vertexColors​

vertexColors: Boolean;

Defines whether vertex coloring is used. Default is false.

vertexShader​

vertexShader: String;

Vertex shader GLSL code. This is the actual code for the shader. In the example above, the vertexShader and fragmentShader code is extracted from the DOM; it could be passed as a string directly or loaded via AJAX instead.

wireframe​

wireframe: Boolean;

Render geometry as wireframe (using GL_LINES instead of GL_TRIANGLES). Default is false (i.e. render as flat polygons).

wireframeLinewidth​

wireframeLinewidth: Float;

Controls wireframe thickness. Default is 1.

Due to limitations of the OpenGL Core Profile with the WebGL renderer on most platforms linewidth will always be 1 regardless of the set value.

Methods​

See the base Material class for common methods.

clone​

function clone( ): ShaderMaterial;

Generates a shallow copy of this material. Note that the vertexShader and fragmentShader are copied by reference, as are the definitions of the attributes; this means that clones of the material will share the same compiled WebGLProgram. However, the uniforms are copied by value, which allows you to have different sets of uniforms for different copies of the material.

Source​

src/materials/ShaderMaterial.js