Transitioning to the New Render Component and Fill Mode API
Hi everyone!
This is a different blog post to what we normally do but with some big changes coming soon, we wanted to give context and advance notice of said changes and more importantly, how they may affect you across the PlayCanvas platform.
Moving from Model Component model import pipeline to new Render Component
As part of the work to enable the import of a model’s hierarchy into the scene, we have introduced Render Asset and Render Component as new features of the Engine and Editor.
Going forward, this will be the default way to render imported models and gives developers greater flexibility in manipulating mesh instances in the model directly in the Editor. For example, with the new pipeline you can import a house FBX model and only use the door mesh instance in the scene instead of the whole model.
However, please note that while the Model Component is compatible with both the Animation and Anim (State Graph) Component, the Render Component/Import Hierarchy feature is only compatible with the Anim (State Graph) Component.
(More details will be shared in an upcoming announcement, stay tuned for that!)
For existing projects using the Model Component, please do not worry. None of the existing functionality is being removed and you will not be forced to update projects to the new pipeline for continued development. Although no new features will be added to the Model Component, the PlayCanvas team will continue to fix bugs with the existing pipeline.
You can even mix both pipelines in the same project if you wish to take advantage of the features in the new pipeline in an existing project. However, please bear in mind that this can add complexity to the project code.
The expected changes over the upcoming months are as follows:
- Add/Rename a Project Setting to switch between the two mesh import pipelines (Currently, this is the ‘Import Hierarchy’ setting).
- Newly created projects will default to using the Render Component pipeline.
- developer.playcanvas.com tutorials will be updated to use Render Component (playcanvas.github.io engine examples have already been updated).
- The template projects (Blank Project, Model Viewer Starter Kit, VR Starter Kit) will be updated to use Render Component.
- User Manual updates and mitigation steps from using the Model Component to Render Component pipelines.