How do I create a HUD on top of my Scenekit.scene

Question

I'm experimenting with Swift and Scenekit. Building a Mac OS X app. It seems quite easy to get a 3d-scene working. But what is scene without some kind of 2D hi-score, radar display, speed indicator, etc? I would expect a SpriteKit-scene to seamlessly integrate into a SceneView but I don't find the documentation very clear about this..

The most obvious and only way I can think of is to position a SKView over a SceneView and render each separately. But is there a more elegant way?

Answer 1

try

scnView.overlaySKScene = aSKScene;

(see SCNSceneRenderer.h) This is the recommended way. An alternative way is to make the SCNView layer backed and add child views or layers (but this is less efficient).

Answer 2

To create a HUD, do something like the following:

// SKContainerOverlay is a class which inherits from SKScene

    SKContainerOverlay *skContainerOverlay = [[SKContainerOverlay alloc] initWithSize:self.sceneView.bounds.size];
    self.sceneView.overlaySKScene = skContainerOverlay;
    self.sceneView.overlaySKScene.hidden = NO;
    self.sceneView.overlaySKScene.scaleMode = SKSceneScaleModeResizeFill; // Make sure SKScene bounds are the same as our SCNScene
    self.sceneView.overlaySKScene.userInteractionEnabled = YES;

You can create all your SKLabelNode objects inside the custom SKContainerOverlay class.

Answer 3

As @Toyos said above, you can use

scnView.overlaySKScene = aSKScene

to superimpose the SKScene on your SCNView.

However, when I tried this in Swift, I found that the overlaySKScene property only becomes visible if you include an import SpriteKit statement.

Answer 4

As @Toyos answered, it is simple to day using scnView.overlaySKScene. If you want an example you can check how Apple did it in their Bananas demo.