[API Review] FX 8 3D API

[joe andresen]

Just a thought,

I would think that Color, ImagePattern, and the Gradients could be 
instances of Materials.

A Material is a texture that is applied to a surface. In todays graphics 
pipeline, the texture on the surface is calculated with shaders, float3 
color variables, and any other types of variables the shaders might use.

If you were to to extend this methodology to prism, setting the fill of 
a Shape with a material would give a more detailed interface for what 
will be processed on those pixels.

For Example, if Color was a Material it would look something like:

//pseudo code

Material color_Material;
//any other initialize code
color.setPixelShader(color_Shader);
color.setFloat3(red_Color);

Rectangle rect = new Rectangle();
rect.setFill(color_Material);

Now this totally breaks down with prism's shape rendering 
implementation, but from an API standpoint, this makes sense to me. (the 
problem being that in prism, what 2d shape you are rendering is 
determined by a pixel shader.)

Here are a couple of other somewhat random libraries' abstraction of a 
Material.

http://clb.demon.fi/gfxapi/docs/Material_summary.php

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Material.html

Interesting how Unity has specific variables that are meant for a Main 
Color. I think this has to do with their public and not standard shader 
architecture. (Surface Shaders)

Flash 3d has no such thing, where instead you have to set shader 
variables from a context, which in my opinion is nasty.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/display3D/Context3D.html

-Joe

The current way does not limit us from doing this in the future so that 
is why it is just a thought :) .