Materials

HxEngine materials are master materials authored in a dedicated editor: you define parameters through the UI and write the shading in HLSL, with a live 3D preview.

Master materials

A material asset describes:

• Parameters — scalar values and texture slots, defined in the UI. The engine auto-generates the constant buffer and texture bindings for them.
• Shading body — you write the material function in HLSL directly in the editor.
• Includes & shader functions — reusable HLSL functions can be pulled into any material and surface in autocompletion.
• Blend mode & feature flags — opaque / masked / translucent / additive, plus compile-time features (normal map, displacement, parallax, emissive, alpha test, two-sided, …).

The HLSL editor

The material editor embeds a code editor (built on AvaloniaEdit + TextMate) with:

• HLSL syntax highlighting.
• Autocomplete for HLSL keywords, engine types and your own shader-function library.
• A live 3D preview that recompiles as you edit.
• A read-only view of the final generated HLSL.

Material domains

A material’s domain decides where and how it plugs into the renderer:

Domain	Use
Surface	Standard lit PBR geometry (deferred)
Translucent	Transparent surfaces (forward)
Subsurface / Cloth / Clear-coat	Specialised shading models
Unlit	No lighting — UI, effects
Decal	Projected textures onto surfaces
Post-process	A full-screen effect in the post chain

Post-process materials

A post-process material is a material whose domain is Post-process. Instead of shading geometry, it runs as a screen-space pass in the post-processing stack — sample the scene color, depth and other buffers, and output a custom effect. It’s the same HLSL editor and parameter workflow as a surface material, so you can author bespoke screen effects without touching the renderer’s code.

Material instances & dynamic parameters

A material instance overrides a master material’s parameters per object, backed by its own parameter buffer. Parameters can be changed at runtime, so materials respond to gameplay — drive a glow, a dissolve, a tint, anything your shader exposes.

MaterialAsset  (master: domain + parameters + HLSL body)
   └── MaterialInstance  (per-object parameter overrides)
          └── set dynamically at runtime

Tip

The hands-on material-authoring guide ships with the engine — request access to dig in.