3D box

A 3D box displays a box in 3D, with up to 6 faces each showing an image.

If you need to show more detail 3D objects, check the 3D model object.

Lighting

Lighting can be set up through layers effects. Ambient and directional light effects allow to configure basic lighting for 3D layers.

3D boxes can be set up to react to lighting in different ways:

• Either it does not react to light, meaning that it's always shown with the colors of the texture that was set (like a 2D object)
• Or it does react to light. In this case, don't forget to set up a light in the layer effects.

Shadows

3D boxes can cast and receive shadows. To see them:

• Add a Directional Light effect to the layer (new layers already include one and an Ambient Light).
• Ensure the box uses the Standard material.
• Enable Shadow casting and Shadow receiving in the object's properties (these are enabled for new objects by default).

Shadows are rendered around the camera. You can tweak their range, quality and the light intensity by editing the Directional Light effect in the layer.

Tiling textures

Instead of stretching a face's image to fit the box, you can make it repeat (tile) by enabling Tile in the object's texture properties. This is useful for surfaces like floors or walls where a small texture should cover a large area.

Use the Tile scale property to control how big the repeated texture appears: a value of 1 displays it at the same size as in 2D, while higher values make the texture larger (so it repeats fewer times across each face).

About transparency

Support for transparency (faces with transparent or semi opaque colors) can be enabled by checking the checkbox "Enable texture transparency" when editing a 3D box object.

This can be produce strange results if you expect other faces of the box to be shown behind. This is due to how 3D rendering works. It's also more costly to render for the 3D engine.

Performance considerations

A lot of 3D boxes can impact your game as they require multiple faces to be rendered, even if these faces are partially or totally hidden behind other 3D or 2D objects.

If your object is only shown from a certain point of view, you can disable the visibility of certain faces of the cube.

Be sure to reduce the number of 3D objects you use as much as you can, especially for good performance on low-end devices. Rather than using multiple objects, you can also enable tiling and resize the object (like you would do with a tiled sprite instead of using multiple sprites).