Augmented Reality for Developers

Material textures, lighting, and shaders

Previously, we introduced the use of Materials that can be attached to objects to determine how they look when rendered in the scene.

An object can have a relatively simple 3D mesh-a set of points connected into triangles that define the outward-facing surface shape of the object. Mapping an Albedo texture onto the mesh surface gives the impression of it having much more detail than the mesh itself provides. This is a critical technique for making detailed shapes with less than a hundred triangles, for example, instead of hundreds of thousands, and saving the amount of processing needed by orders of magnitude.

Shaders are the code that runs in the GPU to render objects using their materials, textures, ...