RENDER

RENDER is an Engine component section (tone="engine"), intrinsic to every table Entity — every object has one, and it can be configured but never removed. It is the smallest section in the Inspector: one field.

Source: the RENDER EmCollapsible in TableEditModeShell.tsx's object Inspector branch.

Fields#

Field	Type	Values	Default	Runtime effect	Replicates
Material	drag-and-drop material slot (MaterialBox)	any project SceneMaterial or built-in preset, or empty	empty (the runtime's per-kind default appearance)	Assigns the material the runtime renders this entity's mesh with. Dragging a material card onto the slot assigns it; the × clears it back to the per-kind default.	Yes — metadata.materialId, part of TableObjectState.metadata

⚠ RENDER has no enable checkbox#

Unlike RIGIDBODY and COLLISION, RENDER renders with no header enable checkbox at all. This is deliberate, not an oversight:

• Visibility is owned end-to-end by one writer — the runtime function that applies visibility to an object also encodes the card-face and hidden-information redaction rules. A second, independent render enable flag would fight that writer.
• The control that governs whether this entity draws anything is the ENTITY header's own Enabled toggle — which, per PlayCanvas semantics, disables every component (not just render) when turned off.
• A metadata.renderEnabled flag was proposed during the ECS alignment work and never implemented. If you encounter a reference to it — in an older doc, a comment, or a memory file — treat it as stale; docs/memory/ecs-terminology.md has been corrected to match this.

See also#

• ENTITY — the actual visibility control.
• PIECE — the panel directly above RENDER; it used to live inside RENDER and was split out because its fields (kind, surface) are not render state.
• materials-and-textures.md — everything a SceneMaterial can configure once assigned here.