Set MapNode material

[atruebin]

Hi there!

I need to use MeshStandardMaterial for the MapPlaneNode so the light affects it. For now it seems the only way to do it is to extend MapPlaneNode class and change material after super() is called.

It would be great to have an option to set the material with constructor argument or have MapNode class atribute storing the material class, so it can be reassigned.

Thank you!

[tentone]

Hello

We can add a callback to set the material, everytime that a new tile is created.

Would this work for you?

[atruebin]

It will still be created with MeshBasicMaterial, and changed after, right? I propose options to change it before creation.

[rotu]

This tripped me up too. I would think that you could pass in a factory function that creates the material, or that you would set MapView.material and each tile would inherit that material (or actually a clone() thereof.

I think I expected (and would like) MapPlaneNode.createChildNodes() to look more like this, which I think is in line with @atruebin's suggestion:

// ...
let node = new Constructor(this, this.mapView, QuadTreePosition.topLeft, level, x, y);
// ...
material = this.material.clone();
material.map = MapNode.defaultTexture;
node.setMaterial(material);
// ... create other child nodes

I think it would suffice to have a onNodeCreated callback on the MapView object which allows overriding the mesh or material as @tentone suggested.

---

To actually change the material in MapView, I had to make the below change, which felt a little awkward.

From this:

const map_view = new MapView(MapView.PLANAR, map_provider)

To this:

class MyMapPlaneNode extends MapPlaneNode {
   constructor(...args) {
      super(...args);
      this.material = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({ transparent: true, opacity: 0.5 });
   }
}
const map_view = new MapView(MapView.PLANAR, map_provider);
map_view.setRoot(new MyMapPlaneNode(null, map_view));

---

I was also a little thrown off by language in the readme which suggests that each node should not necessarily have its own Material. That doesn't really seem doable with the current shader setup.

These materials and geometries can be customized and are not required to be of any specific type. It is recommended to reuse them as much as possible to save memory.