Mesh

A Mesh is a low-level graphics object that stores and renders a list of vertices.

Meshes are really flexible since you can pack pretty much whatever you want in them. This makes them great for rendering arbitrary geometry, but it also makes them kinda difficult to use since you have to place each vertex yourself.

It's possible to batch geometry with Meshes too. Instead of drawing a shape 100 times, it's much faster to pack 100 copies of the shape into a Mesh and draw the Mesh once. Even storing just one copy in the Mesh and drawing that 100 times is usually faster.

Meshes are also a good choice if you have an object that changes its shape over time.

Constructor

lovr.graphics.newMesh

Create a new Mesh.

Methods

Mesh:attachAttributes	Attach attributes from another Mesh onto this one.
Mesh:isAttributeEnabled	Check if a vertex attribute is enabled.
Mesh:setAttributeEnabled	Enable or disable a vertex attribute.
Mesh:detachAttributes	Detach attributes that were attached from a different Mesh.
Mesh:draw	Draw the Mesh.
Mesh:getDrawMode	Get the draw mode of the Mesh.
Mesh:setDrawMode	Change the draw mode of the Mesh.
Mesh:getDrawRange	Get the draw range of the Mesh.
Mesh:setDrawRange	Set the draw range of the Mesh.
Mesh:getMaterial	Get the Material applied to the Mesh.
Mesh:setMaterial	Apply a Material to the Mesh.
Mesh:getVertex	Get a single vertex in the Mesh.
Mesh:setVertex	Update a single vertex in the Mesh.
Mesh:getVertexAttribute	Get an attribute of a single vertex in the Mesh.
Mesh:setVertexAttribute	Update a specific attribute of a single vertex in the Mesh.
Mesh:getVertexCount	Get the number of vertices the Mesh can hold.
Mesh:getVertexFormat	Get the vertex format of the Mesh.
Mesh:getVertexMap	Get the current vertex map of the Mesh.
Mesh:setVertexMap	Set the vertex map of the Mesh.
Mesh:setVertices	Update multiple vertices in the Mesh.

Notes

Each vertex in a Mesh can hold several pieces of data. For example, you might want a vertex to keep track of its position, color, and a weight. Each one of these pieces of information is called a vertex attribute. A vertex attribute must have a name, a type, and a size. Here's what the "position" attribute would look like as a Lua table:

{ 'vPosition', 'float', 3 } -- 3 floats, one for x, y, and z

Every vertex in a Mesh must have the same set of attributes. We call this set of attributes the format of the Mesh, and it's specified as a simple table of attributes. For example, we could represent the format described above as:

{
  { 'vPosition', 'float', 3 },
  { 'vColor',    'byte',  4 },
  { 'vWeight',   'int',   1 }
}

When creating a Mesh, you can give it any format you want, or use the default. The default Mesh format looks like this:

{
  { 'lovrPosition',    'float', 3 },
  { 'lovrNormal',      'float', 3 },
  { 'lovrTexCoord',    'float', 2 }
}

Great, so why do we go through the trouble of naming everything in our vertex and saying what type and size it is? The cool part is that we can access this data in a Shader. We can write a vertex Shader that has in variables for every vertex attribute in our Mesh:

in vec3 vPosition;
in vec4 vColor;
in int vWeight;

vec4 lovrMain() {
  // Here we can access the vPosition, vColor, and vWeight of each vertex in the Mesh!
}

Specifying custom vertex data is really powerful and is often used for lighting, animation, and more!

For more on the different data types available for the attributes, see AttributeType.

Example

Draw a circle using a Mesh.

function lovr.load()
  local x, y, z = 0, 1, -2
  local radius = .3
  local points = 40

  -- A table to hold the Mesh data
  local vertices = {}

  for i = 0, points do
    local angle = i / points * 2 * math.pi
    local vx = x + math.cos(angle)
    local vy = y + math.sin(angle)
    table.insert(vertices, { vx, vy, z })
  end

  mesh = lovr.graphics.newMesh(vertices, 'fan')
end

function lovr.draw()
  mesh:draw()
end

See also

• lovr.graphics