Geometry and buffer utilities

Use these tools at the boundaries between value arrays, GPU buffers, geometry and textures. A buffer contains bytes, not a self-describing mesh. Its element type, stride, offset and count must agree with the consumer. Start with a small dataset and inspect the result before increasing counts.

Choose a conversion path

Keep resource boundaries explicit: value arrays live on the CPU, buffers contain typed-by-convention bytes, geometry adds a draw description, and scenes carry hierarchy and resources. The individual references above are the canonical control and port manuals; the sections below locate them within a workflow.

Array to buffer and Buffer to array

Array to buffer accepts a numeric array or string on Input and exposes it as Output buffer data. Type selects Float32, Float64, signed/unsigned 32-bit, 16-bit or 8-bit elements. Numeric values are converted to that type; strings supply bytes.

Buffer to array performs the opposite boundary crossing. Set Type to the buffer’s actual element representation; Mode selects FloatArray, IntArray or String on Output. Reading GPU-produced data into a value array introduces a readback path: keep calculations on the GPU when a CPU array is not needed.

Array to mesh

See Array to mesh for the XYZ-array contract, placement controls and limits of its optional surface reconstruction. For explicit attribute layouts, use Buffers to geometry instead.

Pointcloud to mesh

Wrap a Buffer in a point-cloud geometry description. Buffer type selects XYZ, XYZ_RGB, XYZW or XYZW_RGBA; choose the format actually produced upstream. Position, Rotation and Scale control placement. Despite the name, this supplies renderable point geometry; it is not a surface-reconstruction algorithm.

Buffers to geometry

See Buffers to geometry for named-semantic attribute setup, indexed draws, instances and topology. Its reference also distinguishes the separately registered Buffers to geometry (v1), which uses numeric attribute locations.

Extract buffer

See Extract buffer for semantic/index selection and vec3 padding. Use the by-name variant below when selecting custom names or scene auxiliary resources.

Extract buffer (by name)

Mode selects Attribute or Buffer, and Name / index identifies the resource:

• Attribute mode accepts semantics such as position, normal, tangent, texcoord0, color0, a numeric attribute index or a custom attribute name.
• Buffer mode accepts a numeric buffer index, index for the index buffer, an auxiliary-buffer name, or an attribute name to retrieve its containing buffer.

Auxiliary names allow explicit access to resources carried by Scene Preprocessor output. Selecting a whole buffer is different from extracting one tightly packed attribute from an interleaved buffer.

Repack attributes

See Repack attributes for attribute selection, packing order and the byte-stride outlet. This creates a new layout rather than selecting a whole existing buffer.

Merge Geometries

Combine eight Geometry 1–8 inputs into Merged. This composes geometry draws and their transforms; it does not weld vertices, perform a boolean union or create a new scene hierarchy. Use Scene Group for hierarchy composition.

Array to texture

See Array to texture for pixel component counts, formats and numeric ranges. It uploads numeric pixels, not encoded image-file bytes.

Texture to buffer

See Texture to buffer for the pixel-byte transfer path and downstream layout requirements. It does not create mesh attributes and is not the direct inverse of Array to texture.

Inject Buffer and Inject Texture

Both take Scene In, a Buffer or Texture, and an Aux name, then emit Scene Out carrying the named auxiliary resource. Use these before Scene Preprocessor to pass custom resources alongside a scene. An unwired resource input leaves the scene unchanged. These tools do not replace material textures; use Material Override for that operation.

Extract Scene Buffer

Read a GPU-backed Buffer from Scene In. Kind selects Environment, Camera or Material. Index selects the camera/material entry and is ignored for Environment. This exposes existing scene resource storage, not an arbitrary serialization of the hierarchy; an absent or unavailable resource cannot produce usable bytes.

Extract texture (by name)

Read an auxiliary texture from Geometry, using Name (for example skybox), and output Texture. Use this after preprocessing when another consumer needs a scene-carried texture explicitly. A 2D texture, cubemap and texture array are different resource kinds: the receiving shader must agree with the extracted resource.

Geometry Info, Buffer Info and Texture Info

Handles are opaque resource identities for diagnostics, not stable values to save and reuse in another run. Connect Readable to a value display to troubleshoot an empty or incorrectly interpreted draw.

See Compute Shaders, Render Pipeline, Mesh generators and splats and 3D scene pipeline for consumers and end-to-end workflows.

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