How to Inject a Custom Shader During Mesh Rendering?

[EsatMan]

I’m trying to implement a billboard effect via a custom shader and looked into MeshRenderFeature. The system seems quite extensive, and building a new RenderFeature appears challenging. I’ve drafted an alternative approach but would like some feedback.

I thought implementing a MaterialFeature might work, so I set up a local Stride deployment and made some experimental modifications—likely not elegant, but functional. I added a List<IMaterialFeature> to MaterialAttributes and inserted a loop in the relevant method: context.Visit(feature). This should allow injecting completely separate material features, I hope that.

This feature would be similar to Displacement, but also fetch the View matrix (from Transformation in the shader streams). I’m unsure which position value I should modify—from what I see in Displacement, it could be either Position or PositionWS (depending on MaterialShaderStage). Is that correct?

The documentation doesn’t explain how MaterialFeature works in depth, but I assume I need to implement GenerateShader to mix shaders into the pipeline and bind the necessary resources. I’ve seen various APIs used across official examples—is there a more systematic guide available?

I’m new to graphics programming, so apologies if this is a basic question. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!