Working with Scene

A scene is a 3d world populated with Node.

Nodes are container objects taking meaning through the use of components.

Node & Components#

Calling Scene.CreateNode returns an empty node with no component attached. In this state, it serves little to no purpose as it will not be drawn or implement any concrete behavior.

Object#

In order to be drawn a node must provide two essential informations:

• A transformation: This is done using Node.SetTransform to assign it a Transform component.
• A visual representation: This is done using Node.SetObject to assign it an Object component.

The object component accepts a ModelRef to a Model and holds a local list of Material used to draw the model. Each object component may hold different material definition for the same model.

The same components can be assigned to multiple nodes.

Camera#

Assign the Camera component to nodes to turn them into observers into the scene.

For more information on how this integrates with drawing a scene, see Drawing a Scene.

Light#

Assign the Light component to nodes to turn them into light sources.

Instance#

Scenes can be instantiated in one another. This is useful to create multiple complex parts with their own animations or scripts from which you compose a larger world.

To instantiate a scene use Node.SetInstance to assign an Instance component to a node. To perform explicit instantiation use Node.SetupInstanceFromAssets or Node.SetupInstanceFromFile.

Note: Instances are automatically setup when loading a scene.

After instantiation, the instance content is held in the host scene. Node.GetInstanceSceneView can be used to access it in isolation from the host content via the returned SceneView object.

Managing Scene Resources#

Most scene resources are returned by value as generational references (see Ownership & References) wrapped into helper classes such as Node, Camera, Light or Object.

The scene has strong ownership of the resources it manages.

Nodes are explicitely destroyed using Scene.DestroyNode and components are implicitely destroyed using Scene.GarbageCollect.