#Embedded Assets

When dealing with custom shaders for materials, it is not uncommon to end up with a lot of different assets with only a small amount of content. To create a material with a custom WebGPU shader, for example, you'll likely end up with:

• A material, containing all the properties.
• A material map, in case other plugins or renderers need the material as well.
• A WebGPU pipeline configuration, describing how the material should be rendered.
• And finally a vertex and fragment shader.

This is all a bit much, especially since, more often than not, you don't even use multiple renderers or plugins.

So to make the project a little less cluttered, you can combine the first three of these into one single asset. This can be done using embedded assets:

1. Locate a droppable GUI for which you want to create an embedded asset. In the example above, this would be the Material Map field in the Properties Window of a material asset.
2. Right-click the droppable GUI, and from the context menu choose Create Embedded Asset.
3. Double-click the droppable GUI to open the created asset.

These steps create an embedded asset inside the material asset. You can perform the same steps for the Forward Pipeline Configuration as well.

If you're curious, you can open the material asset in a text editor and compare the differences to a material without an embedded asset. You'll see that the UUID of the linked asset has been replaced with the asset data of the embedded asset.

So instead of this:

{
	"assetType": "renda:material",
	"asset": {
		"map": "873ade41-8986-4371-b2a3-5bc1aff9d938",
		"properties": {
			"metallicAdjust": 0.123
		}
	}
}

You will see this:

{
	"assetType": "renda:material",
	"asset": {
		"map": {
			// map asset data here
		},
		"properties": {
			"metallicAdjust": 0.123
		}
	}
}