Occlusion Material or Hold-Out Shader in Arkit and Scenekit

Occlusion Material or Hold-Out Shader in ARKit and SceneKit

To generate a hold-out mask, also known as Occlusion Material, use.colorBufferWriteMask, instance property that writes depth data when rendering the material.

sphere.geometry?.firstMaterial?.colorBufferWriteMask = []

Then assign an appropriate object's rendering order:

sphere.renderingOrder = -100  

And, at last, allow SceneKit to read from / write to depth buffer when rendering the material:

sphere.geometry?.firstMaterial?.writesToDepthBuffer = true
sphere.geometry?.firstMaterial?.readsFromDepthBuffer = true

sphere.geometry?.firstMaterial?.isDoubleSided = true

Glass effect in SceneKit material

Create a SCNMaterial and configure the following properties and assign it to the bottle geometry of a SCNNode :

.lightingModel = .blinn
.transparent.content = // an image/texture whose alpha channel defines
                       // the area of partial transparency (the glass)
                       // and the opaque part (the label).
.transparencyMode = .dualLayer
.fresnelExponent = 1.5
.isDoubleSide = true
.specular.contents = UIColor(white: 0.6, alpha: 1.0)
.diffuse.contents =    // texture image including the label (rest can be gray)
.shininess =           // somewhere between 25 and 100
.reflective.contents = // glass won’t look good unless it has something
                       // to reflect, so also configure this as well.
                       // To at least a gray color with value 0.7 
                       // but preferably an image.

Depending on what else is in your scene, the background, and the lighting used, you will probably have to tune the values above to get the desired results. If you want a bottle without the label, use the .transparency property (set its contents to a gray color) instead of the .transparent property.

How to Add Material to ModelEntity programatically in RealityKit?

Updated: June 14, 2022

RealityKit materials

There are 6 types of materials in RealityKit 2.0 and RealityFoundation at the moment:

• SimpleMaterial
• UnlitMaterial
• OcclusionMaterial (read this post to find out how to setup SceneKit occlusion shader)
• VideoMaterial (look at this post to find out how to setup it)
• PhysicallyBasedMaterial
• CustomMaterial

To apply these materials use the following logic:

import Cocoa
import RealityKit

class ViewController: NSViewController {        
    @IBOutlet var arView: ARView!
    
    override func awakeFromNib() {
        let box = try! Experience.loadBox()
        
        var simpleMat = SimpleMaterial()
        simpleMat.color = .init(tint: .blue, texture: nil)
        simpleMat.metallic = .init(floatLiteral: 0.7)
        simpleMat.roughness = .init(floatLiteral: 0.2)
        
        var pbr = PhysicallyBasedMaterial()
        pbr.baseColor = .init(tint: .green, texture: nil) 

        let mesh: MeshResource = .generateBox(width: 0.5, 
                                             height: 0.5, 
                                              depth: 0.5, 
                                       cornerRadius: 0.02, 
                                         splitFaces: true)

        let boxComponent = ModelComponent(mesh: mesh,
                                     materials: [simpleMat, pbr])

        box.steelBox?.children[0].components.set(boxComponent)
        box.steelBox?.orientation = Transform(pitch: .pi/4, 
                                                yaw: .pi/4, 
                                               roll: 0).rotation
        arView.scene.anchors.append(box)
    }
}

Read this post to find out how to load a texture for RealityKit's shaders.

How to create RealityKit's shaders similar to SceneKit's shaders

We know that in SceneKit there are 5 different shading models, so we can use RealityKit's SimpleMaterial, PhysicallyBasedMaterial and UnlitMaterial to generate all these five shaders that we've been accustomed to.

Let's see how it looks like:

SCNMaterial.LightingModel.blinn           – SimpleMaterial(color: . gray,
                                                        roughness: .float(0.5),
                                                       isMetallic: false)

SCNMaterial.LightingModel.lambert         – SimpleMaterial(color: . gray,
                                                        roughness: .float(1.0),
                                                       isMetallic: false)
  
SCNMaterial.LightingModel.phong           – SimpleMaterial(color: . gray,
                                                        roughness: .float(0.0),
                                                       isMetallic: false)

SCNMaterial.LightingModel.physicallyBased – PhysicallyBasedMaterial()


// all three shaders (`.constant`, `UnlitMaterial` and `VideoMaterial `) 
// don't depend on lighting
SCNMaterial.LightingModel.constant        – UnlitMaterial(color: .gray)
                                          – VideoMaterial(avPlayer: avPlayer)

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