Nodes
In terms of Unigine, all of the objects added into the scene are called nodes. Nodes can be used both directly or as reference nodes to which the other nodes refer.
Nodes and Node References
Nodes and node references are fundamental objects that form the world:
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Node is a generic entity representing any object that is positioned and stored in the world.
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Node Reference is a node that refers to an external file on the disk, which contains a pre-fabricated node (or a hierarchy of nodes) with
all the material and property libraries that are required for its rendering.
Notice
The node reference should be used instead of the node if there are a lot of identical objects repeated in the world:
it will enable to avoid manual editing each object if you need to make the same changes in all of these objects. For more details, read the article on Node Reference.
There are also the following differences between nodes and node references:
- To create a node, you need to simply add any object to the scene. To create a node reference, you will need to export a node from UnigineEditor into a .node file and then specify it to be a node reference.
- All changes made for the node are saved in the .world file and affect only one specific node. All changes made for the node reference are saved in the source .node file and affect all the nodes referenced to this file.
Base Nodes
Base nodes are invisible and perform the following:
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Dummy Node is used to organize the other nodes into a hierarchy.
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Layer enables to save all its child nodes into a separate .node file.
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Pivot serves as a pivot point for its child nodes.
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Trigger fires callbacks when it is enabled/disabled or its transformation has been changed.
Last update: 2017-07-03
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