I’m using Niagara Ribbons to draw single pixel lines with a wireframe material. It looks exactly how I want, but I’m concerned about using a ton of these in a single level.
Would it be more performant to manually create my own triangle strip solution? The Niagara Ribbons are just convenient because they have everything built-in, but I don’t need a lot of the extras that come along with a particle system.
How much would I gain by manually generating this instead of letting Niagara do the work?
Cheers,
Ethan
One obvious advantage is that if I created the strip manually it would be almost half the triangles.
Niagara is creating a quad for each line segment, but I only need a triangle per line segment since the line segment is zero width. The Wireframe Material only needs a triangle squished down into a line to work. So it’s 6 triangles per line segment vs 10 if it was a quad (assuming the Wireframe Material requires 2 triangles per line to draw).
[For anyone interested. What the Wireframe Material does is generate a quad mesh between each vertex pair in the mesh drawing order. So between Vertex A and Vertex B in a mesh it creates a triangle strip. That strip is a triangle pair creating a quad or a plane.]
So when I say each line segment costs 6 (or 10) triangles it’s because the only way to draw a line is to squish that triangle down into something that the GPU can process.
Unreal has no problem pushing polys but still a thing to consider.
