Material: Remove obsolete callbacks.

[Mugen87]

Related issue: -

Description

Material.onBuild() and Material.onBeforeRender() were undocumented methods and only relevant for the former node material integration in WebGLRenderer. Now that the integration has been removed, it's probably best to remove these callbacks as well.

[github-actions]

📦 Bundle size

Full ESM build, minified and gzipped.

Filesize dev	Filesize PR	Diff
679.7 kB (168.4 kB)	679.8 kB (168.4 kB)	+66 B

🌳 Bundle size after tree-shaking

Minimal build including a renderer, camera, empty scene, and dependencies.

Filesize dev	Filesize PR	Diff
457.4 kB (110.4 kB)	457.5 kB (110.4 kB)	+66 B

[NikyJJ]

Hello Mugen87,
onBeforeRender was an excellent method that we used to extend our custom shader materials.
Is it possible to revert this callback and its call from WebGLRenderer?

[Mugen87]

Why can't you use Object3D.onBeforeRender() instead?

[NikyJJ]

It could be possible.
In this case we will need to extend the Mesh class in our code to call the Material.onBeforeRender() in our custom material.
The meshes are created by GLTFLoader now and we will need to go over all meshes and recreate them with the new extended class.
It was very clean solution before r166.

[nkallen]

Yeah this change broke some stuff for me too, and the workaround is a bit inconvenient...

We have a post processing pass where there is an overrideMaterial on the scene. Material.onBeforeRender was setting a uniform (incrementing a counter to render each object with a distinct color). I'm trying to think about how to best workaround this now.

[gfodor]

This change broke the light probe work going on in this thread, since the extension being worked on relies upon onBeforeRender to manage the uniform updates for the irradiance probes, etc.

#18371

[nkallen]

Yes can we PLEASE revert this change? having a material callback is super useful!

[Mugen87]

If we add Material.onBeforeRender() back, there will be only support in WebGLRenderer like with onBeforeCompile().

WebGPURenderer with its node material provides better alternatives. Everyone using Material.onBeforeRender() must be aware of that.

There seems to be no use case for Material.onBuild() so there is no reason to revert its removal.

[nkallen]

I think that's fine -- we anticipate having to redo a few of our custom shaders when we move to webgpu. For now, the outline effect in Plasticity relies on setting a scene's override material and using a Material.onBeforeRender hook to assign a unique color (uniform) to objects. This is similar to how OutlineEffect.js works, but avoids having to swap out all of the Object3d.onBeforeRenders

You can see in the below picture how each object having a unique color allows edge detection to draw the outline "between" overlapping objects: