V7 issue with custom points shader (THREE.ShaderMaterial) and default THREE.SpriteMaterial

[japhiaolson]

Description of the bug

When enabling gbuffer normals in the render pipeline, custom Points (implemented with THREE.ShaderMaterial) and default THREE.SpriteMaterial objects fail to render and become invisible.

To reproduce

Enable NORMAL pass to a scene that contains a SpriteMaterial or Points using ShaderMaterial. Everything renders properly except the sprite or points.

Workaround

Adding the following to the SpriteMaterial onBeforeCompile or directly to the custom Points fragment shader make the sprites or points render properly:

// Variable declarations
layout(location = 1) out vec3 gBufferNormal;
// In main
gBufferNormal = normalize(vWorldNormal);

Expected behavior

I made a custom effect to add SSAO to the RenderPipeline which requires the GBuffer NORMAL pass to be enabled, and everything works as expected, except the Points and SpriteMaterials don't render.

Screenshots

Screenshot is with GBuffer.NORMAL enabled and white outlines are without this.input.gBuffer.add(GBuffer.NORMAL) enabled in the effect (and without the noted GLSL fix above).

Library versions used

• Three: 0.176.0
• Post Processing: 7.0.0-beta.11

Desktop

• OS: Windows
• Browser: Chrome 137.0.7151.104
• Graphics hardware: NVIDIA

[vanruesc]

Thanks for the report! I'll take a closer look at this when I get a chance.

[vanruesc]

I've added an improvement for this in v7.0.0-beta.12 which should add the output declarations to all materials. I wasn't able to test this extensively yet though.

Can you try using the following code to see if that works?

// instead of this
//gBufferNormal = normalize(vWorldNormal);
// try this:
vec3 normal = normalize(vWorldNormal);
#include <pp_default_output_fragment>

[japhiaolson]

I just updated to the new beta 12 and updated the sprite and particles with the noted code, and it isn't throwing errors for just those materials. However, it looks like nearly all materials are not seeing the normal vector var anymore and are throwing 'normal' : undeclared identifier until the console overloads with too many WebGL errors on this line:

out_Normal=vec4(normal,1.0);

[vanruesc]

Thanks for checking 👍

it looks like nearly all materials are not seeing the normal vector var anymore

Only non-PBR materials like PointsMaterial should be affected.

These materials don't define any of the variables that are expected to be present in PBR materials. It should be possible to fix this by adding default variables to those materials... I'll work on a fix.