Create Interactive Materials

An interactive material reacts on a mesh when it intersects with or is in close proximity to another mesh. This effect is achieved using a Distance field.

Below are three ways to create a reactive material:

• Using distance to create a mask that changes the color of a mesh,
• Using a sine wave to cause ripples on the surface of the mesh where the two meshes intersect, and
• Using a vector mask to cause the mesh surface to pull toward another mesh in close proximity and drape over the intersecting mesh.

The DistancetoNearestSurface node only works on platforms that have distance fields enabled. Therefore, the material may not work as expected on low performance PCs and mobile because distance field computation is often either a performance bottleneck, because of high-resolution fields, or a nearly impossible task because of degeneracies in input meshes.

Therefore, use the ShadingPathSwitch to force the shaders in the DistancetoNearestSurface to work as configured with mobile platforms and low performance PCs.

First, start by making a material that changes color when it intersects with another mesh:

1. Create a new material in the Content Browser and double-click the material thumbnail to open the Material Editor.
2. Create the following nodes: