Render Usage

By default, Surface Shaders mainly output to the screen and display scenes.

However, sometimes we have some special needs, such as:

• Render to shadow maps
• Render to reflect maps

Different render usages have different processes and details, so they need special handling.

The Surface Shader framework has predefined the commonly used flows for different usages. They can be found in the Assets/internal/chunks/shading-entries/main-functions/ folder.

Here are built-in render usages.

Common Render Usages	Location	Description
Render to Scene(default)	render-to-scene
Render to ShadowMap	render-to-shadowmap
Render to ReflectionMap	render-to-reflectmap	Optional
Render Cartoon Outlines	misc/silhouette-edge
Render Skybox	misc/sky
Post-processing or General Compute Pass	misc/quad	Reserved

You only need to include the corresponding header files during the Surface Shader Assembly phase to complete the rendering process.

For example, in internal/effects/builtin-standard.effect, we can see the application cases as follows.

CCProgram standard-vs %{
    ...
    #include <shading-entries/main-functions/render-to-scene/vs>
}%

CCProgram shadow-caster-vs %{
    ...
    #include <shading-entries/main-functions/render-to-shadowmap/vs>
}%

CCProgram standard-fs %{
    ...
    #include <shading-entries/main-functions/render-to-scene/fs>
}%

CCProgram shadow-caster-fs %{
    ...
    #include <shading-entries/main-functions/render-to-shadowmap/fs>
}%

CCProgram reflect-map-fs %{
    ...
    #include <shading-entries/main-functions/render-to-shadowmap/fs>
}%