Passing an array of Texture2D to a HLSL shader

1

I m trying to add shadows to my Pointlight Shader…
the Shader already works fine for a custom number of pointlights, and now I have written code in my monogame project that renders for every Pointlight 6 Shadow-maps (for every axis direction one), and inserted them in an Texture2D Array, size 6 * n (n = max number of pointlights)

in my Shader I added:

texture ShadowMaps[MaxLightNum*6];
SamplerState ShadowMapSampler
{
MinFilter = point;
MagFilter = point;
MipFilter = point;
AddressU = Wrap;
AddressV = Wrap;
};

…

float4 color = ShadowMaps[0].Sample(ShadowMapSampler, pos);

and monogame content pipeline is fine with that when I build the shader, so I assume an array of textures is allowed in monogame…

though when I try to pass the Texture2D array to the Shader by using:

_Shadows = Global._shader.Parameters[“ShadowMaps”];

…

_Shadows.SetValue(_shadowMaps);
(with _shadowMaps being my Texture2D array)

it underlines _shadowMaps red and says cant convert Texture2D[] to bool ?

what am I doing wrong?

2

Instead of passing an array of textures, you need to pass a single texture, that contains the array.

3

uhm… how do I add an array to a texture?

in the past few hours I already read the same thing somewhere else and tryed to find out how that works, though I couldn t find documentation regarding what most of the Texture2D or RenderTarget2D functions do, online…

I tryed something like

_shadows.SetData(_shadowMaps);

with _shadows being Texture2D and _shadowMaps beign Texture2D[]

though that wouldn t work, told me off, because Texture2D is nullable…

also tryed putting every shadowMap texture in an own Level of a single seperate shadow map, also with SetData, though ran into the problem that the Level of that texture was initialized with 1, and I couldn t find out how to change that^^

I probably don t quite understand how the Texture2D functions are meant, though for some reason, they seem to have no explaination/ definition anywhere online… at least I couldn t find anything^^

so how can I make a single texture contain the array?

thanks

4

The Texture2D constructor has an overload that takes an ArraySize parameter to specify how big the internal texture array should be. Texture2D.SetData has an overload that takes an array index.