Galacean Effects Core

Basic Concepts

In Galacean Effects, a Composition is the unit of animation playback. It is managed by the abstract class Composition, which is responsible for parsing data (JSON -> VFXItem / Texture -> mesh), creating and updating render frames (renderFrame) and render passes (renderPass).

Each composition uses animation data for different types of elements (VFXItems), including camera properties, multiple layers, particles, and interactive elements. When a composition is created, it completes the creation of elements (VFXItems), loading and creation of animation texture maps (Textures), and initialization of render frames (renderFrame) and render passes (renderPass). At the beginning of the composition's lifecycle, the corresponding mesh is added to the default render pass (renderPass). During the lifecycle, the Geometry and Material data contained in the mesh is updated. When post-processing is required, the mesh is split into the appropriate renderPass.At the end of the lifecycle, the corresponding mesh is removed from the renderFrame.

To play the animation, the engine retrieves the mesh from the renderFrame and adds it to the scene, continuously calls the update function of the Composition during the rendering loop to update the data.

Process

1. Resource Loading and Creation

• Asset Download AssetManager: Before playing the animation, JSON data along with binary resources (processBins) and image resources (processImages) are downloaded. Upon completion of image downloads, parameters for creating textures (Texture) are returned. In addition to basic resource downloading functionality, the following features are supported:
  1. Selective downloading of resources based on rendering levels.
  2. After loading the image, image/text replacement is performed according to the configuration, and the modified image is saved as an imageData object by drawing on a Canvas.
  3. Enable the gl extension KHR_parallel_shader_compile to compile shaders after resource loading is completed.
• Texture Creation Texture: Textures are created based on the parameters obtained from the resource download process. The current texture object may be based on one of the creation types defined in the TextureSourceType enumeration.

2. Animation Playback

• Composition: The composition manages the data processing and rendering setup for animation playback. The initialize function is called to initialize the VFXItemManager for JSON -> VFXItem processing. Additionally, the engine needs to retrieve the mesh when appropriate through composition.renderFrame and add the retrieved mesh to the scene.

  1. Static initialize method:
     • The engine needs to implement the creation of VFXItemManager, Composition instances, and converting texture parameters to Texture usable by the engine.
  2. In the constructor, the following functions need to be called:
     • Plugin system pluginSystem.initializeComposition().
     • composition.resetRenderFrame(): Create and initialize the renderFrame.
     • composition.reset(): Parse the animation data and initialize the state of the render instance.
     • composition.play(): Start playing the composition animation.
  3. update method: Used to call the renderFrame's methods to add/modify/delete meshes and drive the update and vertex data, uniform variable values, etc., of VFXItems. The following functions need to be implemented:
     • updateVideo: Update video frames for video playback.
     • getRendererOptions: Return a blank Texture created using the data.
     • reloadTexture/offloadTexture: Reload/unload textures.
  4. The mesh or rendering objects added to the scene can be retrieved through the renderFrame, and the interface can be freely designed in the Composition according to the engine's needs.
  5. dispose method: When the composition's lifecycle comes to an end, this method is called based on the termination behavior. It executes the composition's disposal callback for VFXItem and also destroys associated objects such as meshes and textures.

• RenderFrame: The RenderFrame can be understood as the rendering data object corresponding to each frame of the composition. In addition to managing the renderPass, it also stores the camera properties and common uniform variable table (semantics) associated with the composition. The meshes corresponding to different types of elements are added and removed using addMeshToDefaultRenderPass and removeMeshFromDefaultRenderPass methods of renderFrame. The mesh is added to the appropriate position in the renderPass based on its priority property.

  1. addMeshToDefaultRenderPass/removeMeshFromDefaultRenderPass:
     • For compositions without filter elements, the engine can manage all meshes through the defRenderPass, or it can directly place the passed-in mesh into its own scene. The engine can also organize and manage the meshes as required.
     • For compositions with filter elements involving post-processing, the effects-core will call the splitDefaultRenderPassByMesh function to split the renderPass using the splitting parameters. In this case, the engine needs to iterate over renderFrame._renderPasses to retrieve meshes and add them to the scene.
     • When adding a mesh, the common uniforms used by the material can be obtained through mesh.material.uniformSemantics, including matrices related to MVP transformations and the attachments used.
  2. setEditorTransformUniform: This method is used to set the translation/scaling transformation of an element after model transformation. The engine may not necessarily understand this concept but can set the value to semantics[EDITOR_TRANSFORM].

• RenderPass: The meshes added to the scene can be obtained through renderPass.meshes. The render pass renderPass contains the meshes for the current pass, the operations for clearing the buffer before and after rendering, and attachments related to color, depth, and stencil. The delegate property is used to specify the callbacks before and after rendering for the renderPass, as defined in filters. The engine needs to execute these callbacks before actually rendering the meshes to ensure the correct operation of the filters.

• Mesh: Each VFXItem calls the Mesh.create() function during initialization, passing in parameters such as geometry and material, and sets/retrieves the rendering order for the current mesh using priority.

  1. The static create method is used to create a new Mesh object that the engine can render. The engine needs to add geometry, material, and other objects to the mesh here.
     • The primitive type to be rendered can be obtained from geometry.mode.
  2. The setter and getter functions for priority are used to set the rendering order of the current mesh. Meshes with lower priority values should be drawn before those with higher values.
  3. setVisible/getVisible sets the visibility of the mesh.

Tips

• Each spriteVFXItem does not necessarily correspond to a single mesh. Layer elements are compared using a diff algorithm during frame updates to determine whether adjacent meshes have the same material properties, and then the meshes are split or merged accordingly.
• To obtain the mesh corresponding to the current VFXItem, you can use VFXItem.content.mesh to retrieve it.

3. Geometry

Each VFXItem calls the Geometry.create() function during initialization, passing in the drawing type, vertex data, and index data of the element. During each frame update, new vertex data is passed to the attribute data.

1. The static create method: It processes the passed attribute data. If the data contains the dataSource property, it indicates that the attribute shares a buffer with the data source.
   • size, offset, and stride are also passed in. If the data length is 0 and the engine does not allow dynamic modification of the GPU cache length, an initialization array should be created using the maxVertex parameter.
2. setAttributeData/getAttributeData: Sets/retrieves attribute data for the specified attribute name.
3. setAttributeSubData: Sets partial attribute updates.
4. getIndexData/setIndexData: Sets/retrieves index data.
5. setDrawCount/getDrawCount: Sets/retrieves the draw count.

Attributes involved:

Sprite

1. aPoint: Float32Array - Vertex data
2. aIndex: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aPoint
3. Index data: Uint16Array

Particle

1. aPos: Float32Array
2. aVel: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aPos
3. aDirX: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aPos
4. aDirY: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aPos
5. aRot: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aPos
6. aSeed: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aRot
7. aColor: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aRot
8. aOffset: Float32Array
9. aSprite: Float32Array
10. Index data: Uint16Array

Particle-trail

1. aColor: Float32Array
2. aSeed: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aColor
3. aInfo: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aColor
4. aPos: Float32Array - Shared buffer with aColor
5. aTime: Float32Array
6. aDir: Float32Array
7. aTrailStart: Float32Array
8. aTrailStartIndex: Float32Array

4. Material

Each VFXItem calls the Material.create() function during initialization, passing the shader and uniform semantics. The states and uniform data of the material are not passed in the constructor parameters but are set through functions after material creation.

1. Static create method: It needs to handle the provided shader text and set the uniformSemantics.
2. Implementation of setter/getter methods for states: The constant type passed is glContext, which may need to be converted to constants defined by the engine.
3. set[dataType]/get[dataType] methods for uniforms: effects-core will invoke the corresponding methods based on the type of the uniform to set data.

⚠️ Note: The related UBO calls are deprecated, and material-data-block does not need to be implemented.

Uniforms involved and their types:

Sprite

1. uMainData: mat4
2. uTexParams: vec4
3. uTexOffset: vec4
4. uSampler\[i]: sampler2D
5. uSamplerPre: sampler2D
6. uFeatherSampler: sampler2D

Particle

1. uSprite: vec4
2. uParams: vec4
3. uAcceleration: vec4
4. uGravityModifierValue: vec4
5. uOpacityOverLifetimeValue: vec4
6. uRXByLifeTimeValue: vec4
7. uRYByLifeTimeValue: vec4
8. uRZByLifeTimeValue: vec4
9. uLinearXByLifetimeValue: vec4
10. uLinearYByLifetimeValue: vec4
11. uLinearZByLifetimeValue: vec4
12. uSpeedLifetimeValue: vec4
13. uOrbXByLifetimeValue: vec4
14. uOrbYByLifetimeValue: vec4
15. uOrbZByLifetimeValue: vec4
16. uSizeByLifetimeValue: vec4
17. uSizeYByLifetimeValue:vec4
18. uColorParams: vec4
19. uFSprite: vec4
20. uPreviewColor: vec4
21. uVCurveValues: vec4Array
22. uFCurveValues: vec4
23. uFinalTarget: vec3
24. uForceCurve: vec4
25. uOrbCenter: vec3
26. uTexOffset: vec2
27. uPeriodValue: vec4
28. uMovementValue: vec4
29. uStrengthValue: vec4
30. uWaveParams: vec4

API Documentation