wanton eagle
I've been working on my renderer and one thing struck me as an interesting technical challenge I don't really know how to fix so I was hoping someone more experienced in game engines + asset pipelines could help with this.
Essentially what I'm referring to is meshes like a computer terminal that can be interacted with but rather than being rendered as a simple overlay over the screen UI they're a texture that's being rendered on top of a mesh in 3D.
In principle this should be pretty simple - mark a specific part of a mesh as the designated "screen zone" and then when rendering just render the terminal ui to a texture, then render the texture on that screen zone.
But in terms of architecture around this I'm kinda stuck. Let's say I'm an artist making a new computer terminal mesh, do I have to make it so that all meshes labelled e.g: terminal_screen get treated specially?
Do I overwrite the emissive component of the material with the ui texture?
etc...
Essentially what do you do when the model asset has textures that get dynamically generated by the game itself.
How do you flag regions of the model as X