Custom GPU Resources

Pebble is deliberately low-level — the built-in asset types (Mesh, Texture, Material, Compute, …) cover the common cases, but nothing stops you from working with Buffer/BindGroup/TextureView directly, or defining an entirely new asset type. This page is about the escape hatches.

Your own asset type

The usual path — see The Asset Pipeline and Handles for the full explanation of the asset! macro and why uploads retry instead of failing:

asset!(MyThing => GPUMyThing, |self, backend: &Backend| {
    Some(GPUMyThing { /* ... */ })
});

app.add_plugin(AssetPlugin::<Backend, MyThing>::new())

Building a pipeline outside Assets<T>

build_material/build_compute — the same functions the asset upload path calls internally — are public, for callers assembling their own wiring around a Material/Compute description without going through the usual asset flow:

let (pipeline, layout) = build_material(&backend, &material_desc, &layout_pool)
    .expect("all dependencies must already be registered");

A custom pipeline type of your own

There’s no generic BindGroupTarget/BindingInstance<T> extension point to plug a new pipeline type into — Material/Compute each resolve their own named bind group values directly (via the internal, crate-private params::build_bind_group), rather than through a trait a third pipeline type could also implement. Building a genuinely new kind of pipeline (neither a render pipeline nor a compute pipeline) means following the same shape Material/Compute do rather than extending them: your own CPU-side descriptor struct, an upload() that compiles a wgpu pipeline (mirroring build_material/build_compute above) and then builds a BindGroup directly via BindGroupBuilder (see Bind Groups and Layouts) against whatever entries your own type declares.

Raw buffers, textures, and bind groups

For anything that doesn’t need the asset system’s retry/dependency machinery at all — a one-off buffer, a render target texture — build them directly with BufferBuilder and BindGroupBuilder. A standalone render target is just an ordinary Texture::empty(...) (.with_sample_count(...)/.with_extra_usage(...) for MSAA or extra usage flags) — see Textures, Buffers, and Bind Groups and Layouts.