XDECAL™ ****User-guide


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Implementation notes


In various software, decals are usually implemented using one of the following approaches:

  1. As regular objects: decals are full-fledged separate objects which are just placed over the scene geometry with some small offset

  2. As part of a shader: each decal effectively serves as a separate layer within the material, taking its texture coordinates from a corresponding projector object and overriding/modifying the previous nodes' outputs where the decal is opaque

  3. As a post-processing effect: decals essentially function as image projectors which modify various channels during the frame compositing, after the scene's solid geometry has been rendered. This is only possible in game engines which use deferred rasterization rendering, and is generally not applicable to Blender

Advantages / Disadvantages


In the context of Blender specifically, the first two methods have the following advantages and disadvantages:

Aspect Object Shader
Materials can be shared/reused ✔️
Easy to add/remove (especially if decals cover multiple objects) ✔️
Can scale to a large number of decals on the same object ✔️
Performance cost is paid only where decals are located (rather than the entire object surface) ✔️
Can define the ordering of decals ✔️
Can cut holes/make dents in objects (by overriding alpha or displacement) ✔️
Can be easily baked into a texture ✔️
No extra geometry ✔️

<aside> 🚧

This addon takes the object-based approach, with the core aspects of decal behavior being implemented via geometry nodes

</aside>

Known issues


◤◢ Known Issues / Limitations ◤◢


This appears to be due to anti-aliasing, and Blender's GPU module currently provides no way to turn it off from scripts

The reason for this error is not clear, but so far it didn't seem to lead to any other negative consequences other than that warning in the console)


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