From cube material to the shaders on GPU
Let’s focus on the Depth Prepass since this is a simple pass.
As we discussed, the cube drawing command has been transferred into these graphics API calls.
And we also have this image:
But let me ask a simple question:
<aside> ❓ where do the vertex shader and pixel shader come from?
</aside>
For the depth prepass, we only need to discuss the vertex shader, which simplifies things.
The answer is that the material compiles into one or more vertex shaders and pixel shaders.
Let's discuss this further.
The runtime object of our material called UMaterial , but this one is not UMaterial :
This is UMaterial**Graph**. UMaterial holds a reference to it, but only in editor.
<aside> ℹ️ We don’t need this node graph when we release our game to players.
</aside>
UMaterialGraph will be compiled and then transformed into actual Shader code. This portion of Shader code is what is used during runtime.