Set viewport as texture unit

Is it possible to use viewport as texture unit in material?

<material>
    <technique name="Techniques/myTechinque" quality="0" loddistance="0" />
    <texture unit="diffuse" name="viewport" />
</material>

I guess you could render viewport to a separate texture in the renderpath, and reference that texture in here.

Do you have an example ?

I believe we have found quite elegant solution for this if you really want to reference Render Target texture in Material w/o any material-related code.

1. Create empty placeholder texture in resource folder
2. Now you can load it and keep it in ResourceCache with built-in tools
3. Use it in Materials, etc
4. Instead of creating new texture for Viewport, load this texture and call SetSize with TEXTURE_RENDERTARGET to make it render target.

This way you can have 100% dynamic resource natively accessible by components and other resources.

AddManualResource will work too, but you will have to synchronize access in order not to access resource before its creation.

However, you must have explicit render target creation for this to work.

I know that I can create Texture2d class like this :

myTexture  = Texture2D();
myTexture(int(size.x), int(size.y), GetRGBAFormat(), TEXTURE_RENDERTARGET);
myTexture.name = "myTexture";
cache.AddManualResource(myTexture);

This way I can use it like :

<texture unit="diffuse" name="myTexture" />

So your method seems to be similar. But I am confused.

1. I need to add texture file with any data in it? For example “Textures/empty.png”?
2. Should I use GetResource() ?
3. How do I reference this texture in material?
4. Do I need to add commands (with CopyFrameBuffer) to renderPath to fill it with viewport data?

Unfortunatelly, my solution cannot work neither for your main window viewport (but I think you don’t need it, right?), nor for internal renderpath textures (like gbuffer textures in deferred render path).

However, I assume that you have some custom render target and non-main viewport (like in sample 10_RenderToTexture). In this scenario, all you need to do is to use texture from Resource Cache instead of new texture in this line

In this context, answers to your questions:

1. Yes, any texture file will do, just make sure it’s valid and loads
2. Yes, you have to use cache->GetResource
3. Like any other texture on the disk: by name (e.g. “Textures/empty.png”, although you will want more specific name)
4. N/A, given my comments above. This trick works only for main output texture of render-to-texture viewport.

Ok, I confirm that this method is working,