CC3Material - part 2 (Multitexturing)

Continuing on from last week, we'll again look at the CC3Material class within Cocos3D-XNA and run through an example of how to add (multiple) textures to our materials. To begin, we load our texture files

CC3GraphicsTexture2D crateTexData = new CC3GraphicsTexture2D("Content/crate.jpg");
CC3GraphicsTexture2D logoTexData = new CC3GraphicsTexture2D("Content/logo.gif");

CC3Texture crateTexture = new LCC3Texture(0, "crate");
crateTexture.GraphicsTexture = crateTexData;

CC3Texture logoTexture = new LCC3Texture(1, "logo");
logoTexture.GraphicsTexture = logoTexData;

that are seen below

and then add these textures to our material

multiTexMaterial.AddTexture(crateTexture);
multiTexMaterial.AddTexture(logoTexture);

Finally, we need to specify how these textures are overlaid. This is done by setting the ivar TextureUnitMode in our texture objects which is of enum type CC3TextureUnitMode  that (currently) takes one of the following values

// replace src with dst
CC3TextureUnitMode.Replace,

// add src with dst
CC3TextureUnitMode.Add, 

// replace src with dst where alpha > 0.0
CC3TextureUnitMode.Decal, 

// mix src with dst using TextureUnitConstantColor
CC3TextureUnitMode.Blend 

Note, that the order of rendering of textures in a material is based on the order in which it's added. So typically the first texture added would have the  TextureUnitMode set to CC3TextureUnitMode.Replace. So for our example we would have

crateTexture.TextureUnitMode = CC3TextureUnitMode.Replace;

Then, for subsequent textures that are drawn on top of the initial texture, it's a matter of playing around with the different mixing effects. For the case of CC3TextureUnitMode.Blend a user is required to additionally set a texture object's TextureUnitConstantColor ivar which can adjust the alpha of the source texture as well as overlay it with an additional hue.

Overall, in combination with the other different material/lighting attributes talked about last week, you can get some pretty nice effects as seen below

Click to enlarge