UniformsUtils.clone() is deprecated — but nothing replaces it?

It looks like recent versions of ThreeJS have deprecated UniformsUtils.clone() with a warning message. However, Object.assign (which has replaced it in the examples) is not a real replacement. The reason is that Object.assign doesn’t do a deep clone or clone ThreeJS specific objects, like THREE.Color or THREE.Vector3.

Typical usage:

const baseShaderMaterial = new THREE.ShaderMaterial({ ... });

const redShaderMaterial = baseShaderMaterial.clone();

// we can now mutate the uniforms without affecting the base material!
redShaderMaterial.uniforms.color.value.setStyle('red');

Any particular reason why this function is deprecated? I’ve found it quite useful.

Cheers!

[aardgoose]

I was expecting you to reverse this, given the breakages it was causing. Got me to learn more parts of the code, so not at all wasted.

[takahirox]

FYI,

I think the reason why this didn’t cause any problems among non-ShaderMaterials is their uniforms are dynamically updated right before their rendering by copying the data from material parameters to shared uniforms.

Even with ShaderMaterial we can do that by using onBeforeRender() without THREE.UniformsUtils.clone(). Actually OutlineEffect does this and haven’t faced any problems (so far).