Orienting ourselves with a logic-driven compass

We are used to applying materials to 3D models – after all, that’s what we’ve done in most of the recipes in this book. Having said that, there are other realms where materials and shaders can leave their mark, some of which we’ve already seen. As an example, you might remember the decals that we worked with back in the Adding decals to our scenes recipe in this very same chapter: decals are not 3D models, and as such one of the first things we needed to adjust was the Material Domain property of the new material we created in that recipe.

Another field where we can use materials is in the user interface of our game, and that’s where we are going to focus our attention during the next few pages. We are going to learn how to create a compass that we can use to orient ourselves within the game world, and such an element is usually part of the user interface. As a result, we are going to dip our toes...