name: prowl-rendering description: Materials, shaders, cameras, lights and effects in Prowl. Use when creating or editing materials, picking shaders, setting up cameras (field of view, clip planes, a weapon viewmodel camera), adding post processing, lights, fog, skybox, lightmap bakes, or particle effects such as muzzle flashes. metadata: version: "1.0.1"

Prowl rendering

Materials

Colour values are linear, in materials and lights alike. Textures are decoded from sRGB, but a colour you type is used as is, so a colour picked in an image editor comes out too bright and washed out. Convert it first, roughly value ^ 2.2: sRGB 0.5 grey is linear 0.21.

The built in Standard shader uses these property names. material <ref> lists the real ones for any shader.

Metallic and emission do nothing on their own. The shader multiplies them by a texture: metallic is _SurfaceTex.b * _Metallic, and the default surface texture has a blue of 0. Emission is _EmissionTex * _EmissiveColor * _EmissionIntensity, and the default emission texture is black. Assign a surface or emission texture (a white texture works for emission) before those values show. _Roughness works without a texture and defaults to 1, fully rough.

• From the CLI: material Materials/Metal.mat --values '{"_MainColor": [0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1], "_EmissionTex": "Textures/White.png", "_EmissiveColor": [1, 0.5, 0, 1], "_EmissionIntensity": 4}'.
• In code: material.SetColor, SetFloat, SetTexture, SetVector.
• Shader variants are separate shaders: Shader.LoadDefault(DefaultShader.StandardTransparent), also StandardCutout, StandardDoubleSided and others. There is no Shader.Find.
• There is no MaterialPropertyBlock. For a per object colour, Clone() the material and assign the copy. Dispose clones you no longer need. Changing a shared material asset changes every object using it.
• .shader files have their own format with GLSL bodies. Start from an existing shader or the editor's create menu, not from Unity ShaderLab.

Cameras

• A newly added Camera component has FarClipPlane 100, FieldOfView 60, no Profile and AntiAliasing None. The default scene's Main Camera is the same.
• Camera.Main is the enabled camera with the highest Depth that draws to the screen.
• Anti aliasing is a camera field, not an effect: camera.AntiAliasing = AntiAliasingMode.FXAA (also SMAA, TAA), tuned through camera.Fxaa, camera.Smaa and camera.Taa.
• camera.HDR (on by default) renders into float colour, which the Tonemapping volume component maps to the display. Without one, or with Mode None, light above 1 clips. Cameras made by a new scene or GameObject > Camera start with VolumeProfile.CreateCameraDefault(name), a profile with Tonemapping set to AgXPunchy. A camera added with AddComponent<Camera>() has no profile, so give it that one.
• Post processing comes from volume profiles. A VolumeProfile holds volume components from Prowl.Runtime.Rendering: Tonemapping, Bloom, AutoExposure, AmbientOcclusion, ScreenSpaceReflections, MotionBlur, DepthOfField, GodRays, Vignette, ChromaticAberration, FilmGrain, ColorGrading, ColorLookup, Sharpen, EdgeDetection, Pixelation, VolumetricFog. The camera's own Profile applies under every Volume component in the scene. A Volume is global by default, or set IsGlobal = false and a Size to apply it only inside a box.
• Each setting is a VolumeParameter and only counts once overridden. Use .Set(value) to set and override it in one go, or Add<T>(overrideAll: true).
• Bloom is off until Intensity is above 0. Threshold defaults to 1.2, so mostly emissive and very bright surfaces bloom. Lower it to make lit surfaces glow too. Tonemapping.Mode is a TonemappingMode: None, ACES, AgXNeutral, AgXPunchy, Reinhard, RomBinDaHouse or Uncharted2. AgXNeutral is a soft filmic curve that desaturates bright colours, AgXPunchy adds contrast and saturation, and ACES keeps colours punchier still.
• A custom tonemapper is a PostEffect whose Stage is PostEffectStage.Tonemap. Its shader maps linear HDR light to linear 0 to 1 in outColor, Prowl clamps and encodes it for the display, and it takes the place of the Tonemapping component.

// prowl eval: bloom, tonemapping and FXAA on the main camera
using Prowl.Runtime.Rendering;
var camera = Scene.Current.FindObjectsOfType<Camera>()[0]!;
camera.Profile = VolumeProfile.CreateCameraDefault("Main Camera Profile");
camera.Profile.Add<Bloom>().Intensity.Set(1f);
camera.Profile.Get<Tonemapping>()!.Mode.Set(TonemappingMode.ACES);
camera.AntiAliasing = AntiAliasingMode.FXAA;
return camera.Profile.Components.Count;

Eval changes do not mark the scene dirty, so scene --action save afterwards.

A first person viewmodel camera keeps the gun from clipping into walls:

using Prowl.Runtime;
 
public sealed class ViewmodelSetup : Component
{
    public Camera World;
    public Camera Viewmodel;
 
    public override void Start()
    {
        int weapon = LayerMask.NameToLayer("Weapon");
        World.CullingMask.RemoveLayer(weapon);
 
        Viewmodel.Depth = World.Depth + 1;
        Viewmodel.Background = CameraBackground.None;
        Viewmodel.CullingMask = LayerMask.FromMask(1u << weapon);
        Viewmodel.NearClipPlane = 0.01f;
    }
}

The viewmodel camera is a child of the world camera, and the arms and gun objects are on the Weapon layer (define it first, see the prowl-cli eval recipes).

Environment

Scene.Current.Environment holds the sky, ambient light and fog. SkyMaterial is a Material whose shader has a Sky pass, usually from SceneEnvironment.CreateSkyMaterial(BuiltInSky.Procedural) (also Gradient, Cubemap, Panorama, SixSided), null shows SkyColor. Ambient (Mode Uniform, Hemisphere or Sky, Intensity, colours) and Fog (Mode Off, Linear, Exponential, ExponentialSquared, Color, Density, Start, End, UseSky) are struct fields: set them directly, for example Scene.Current.Environment.Fog.Mode = FogMode.Off (FogMode and AmbientMode are in Prowl.Graphite.Rendering). Copying one into a local and changing the local does nothing. Fog is on by default (exponential squared, density 0.01).

Lights and lightmaps

• One Light component, its Type one of LightType.Directional, Point, Spot, Rect, Disk, Tube. It shines along Forward. Spot angles are half angles (InnerAngle, OuterAngle), rects use Width and Height, disks Width as the diameter, tubes Length and SourceRadius. Cookie (2D for a spot, cubemap for a point) and IesProfile work on points and spots. Directional, point and spot lights cast shadows (CastShadows, ShadowResolution, ShadowFilter, directional Cascades and ShadowDistance). The brightest directional light is the sun.
• Renderers take ShadowCasting (Off, On, ShadowsOnly) and ReceiveShadows.
• Only objects with IsStatic set get lightmaps. The bake runs from the Environment panel and only progresses while that panel is open.

Particles

• ParticleSystemComponent (namespace Prowl.Runtime.ParticleSystem, module types and their enums such as ParticleBlendMode in Prowl.Runtime.ParticleSystem.Modules) modules are fields: Initial, Emission, Shape, Renderer start enabled, the rest (ColorOverLifetime, SizeOverLifetime, Trails and so on) need Enabled = true.
• Curves are MinMaxCurve. From the CLI: set /Muzzle:ParticleSystemComponent Emission.RateOverTime.ConstantValue 0.

using Prowl.Runtime;
using Prowl.Runtime.ParticleSystem;
 
public sealed class MuzzleFlash : Component
{
    public ParticleSystemComponent Flash;
 
    public override void Start()
    {
        Flash.Looping = false;
        Flash.PlayOnEnable = false;
        Flash.Emission.RateOverTime.ConstantValue = 0f;
        Flash.Initial.StartLifetime.ConstantValue = 0.05f;
        Flash.Initial.StartSpeed.ConstantValue = 0f;
    }
 
    public void Fire() => Flash.Emit(6);   // emits right away, playing or not
}

Look up Material, Shader, Camera, VolumeProfile and ParticleSystemComponent with api --type.