Creating an "Electromagnetic Spectrum" style particle system?

I’m trying to “visualize” radio waves specifically via particle systems, texture, possibly blueprints, or even a Post-Processing material/unbound volume. Not really sure exactly how to get going with this at all frankly.

Basically it would be similar in design to the Architecture of Radio app (Example here) where in the finalized version you could look around the game level, see various way-points over routers, cell phones, and other EMS emitting objects throughout the scene (I have the way-points working more or less). Preferably the EM waves would also at times bounce off of walls and other collision meshes, while phasing through half the time (through the same objects). Further away signals from radio towers or satellites for example, would literally be a “wall” passing through every now and then. While the nearby signals from routers, cell-phones, etc. would be seen pulsing from their origin from that object- while also bouncing off various objects/waves.

Some examples of what it could look like:

Dipole_xmting_antenna_animation_4_408x318x150ms.gif


Thank you anyone for any and all suggestions!

If I were going for physically accurate, I would use the volumetric decal system and draw the radio waves using the algorithm from this shader (Shader - Shadertoy BETA ) but extended to 3D.

If you’re going for whatever that app is… I dunno… draw some dots on an expanding sphere mesh and distort it according to the global distance field?

There are some interesting ways to do it in Unity…

Thank you for the help! I’ll try it out.

If you do a post process and then do a depth and do a frac/modulo on it, you’ll get a repeating black/white strip effect (which could be remapped to be a thin strip). Then the next step would be to use worldposition and another user defined position to get a new direction vector which would be used to draw a new ‘depth’ and control the direction of the thin strips. they would be circular in nature as they move away from the user defined point.

I’ll definitely look into that, sounds like what I’m looking for. Thank you!