Render Effects
There are a number of special render effects that may be set on scene graph nodes to change the way they render. This includes BillboardEffect, Compass Effect, DecalEffect, PolylightEffect, and ShowBoundsEffect.
List of All Render Effects:
- BillboardEffect
Dictates that geometry at this node should automatically rotate to face the camera, or any other arbitrary node.
- CharacterJointEffect
The effect binds the node back to the character, so that querying the relative transform of the affected node will automatically force the indicated character to be updated first.
- PolylightEffect
A PolylightEffect can be used on a node to define a LightGroup for that node. A LightGroup contains PolylightNodes which are essentially nodes that add color to the polygons of a model based on distance. PolylightNode is a cheap way to get lighting effects specially for night scenes
- CompassEffect
In its purest form, a CompassEffect is used to keep the node’s rotation fixed relative to the top of the scene graph, despite other transforms that may exist above the node. Hence the name: the node behaves like a magnetic compass, always pointing in the same direction.
- ShowBoundsEffect
Applied to a GeomNode to cause a visible bounding volume to be drawn for this node. This is generally used only during development to help identify bounding volume issues.
- DecalEffect
Applied to a GeomNode to indicate that the children of this GeomNode are coplanar and should be drawn as decals (eliminating Z-fighting).
- TexProjectorEffect
This effect automatically applies a computed texture matrix to the specified texture stage, according to the relative position of two specified nodes.
RenderEffect represents render properties that must be applied as soon as they are encountered in the scene graph, rather than propagating down to the leaves. This is different from RenderAttrib, which represents properties like color and texture that don’t do anything until they propagate down to a GeomNode.
You should not attempt to create or modify a RenderEffect directly; instead, use the make() method of the appropriate kind of effect you want. This will allocate and return a new RenderEffect of the appropriate type, and it may share pointers if possible. Do not modify the new RenderEffect if you wish to change its properties; instead, create a new one.
Once you have created a RenderEffect, you need to decide what it should affect. If you have an effect that should affect everything in the scene the NodePath in the next line of code is “render”. If you only want it to affect specific objects, choose the appropriate place in the scene graph.
nodePath.node().setEffect(<Render Effect>)