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LibGDX Meshes
start » LibGDX Meshes
This series will cover Mesh and ImmediateModeRenderer utilities in LibGDX, and using custom shaders to create highly performant and specialized effects. Before starting, you should get familiar with the following:
- Texture Handling
- Shaders - you should read up to Lesson 2, at least
- Sprite Batch Basics
As discussed in the earlier tutorials; a single vertex can hold information about Position, Color, Texture Coordinates, or whatever else we would like to pass to the shaders. If we wanted to make a 2D white triangle, we would use three vertices, each one holding a Position attribute with (x, y) components.
OpenGL doesn't know the concept of a Mesh; this is a LibGDX utility. In LibGDX, a Mesh is really just a big array of vertices. It's important to understand that a Mesh doesn't need to represent a single primitive object; in fact, you should generally try to pack as much data into one Mesh as you can. For example; if we wanted to render many rectangular sprites (made up of two triangles each), we would try to fit all of this data into a single Mesh, and push all the data to GL in a single render call.
We can use custom meshes to render arbitrary geometry, like thick 2D lines, polygons, finger swipe effects, etc. We can also use the concepts here to create highly optimized particle systems, stateless renderers, and more.
Move onto Lesson 1 to get started.