Display ~100,000 "points" without destroying performance

[anonymous_user_e59b32e3]

@Vipar;342169

The pictures you’ve shown really looks like shading. Unless I see someone do it in code, I refuse to believe that it’s rendered like that in real-time, but rather faked with shading or post processing.

It very well could have been faked with shading or post processing. I can’t link to a video of the implementation I saw (I saw it being used while I was working in a robotics lab, the graphics of the robot and LIDAR visualization were done with jMonkeyEngine in real-time), but it’s similar to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KknQpzIflU&feature=youtu.be&t=87 (Note, I have absolutely no idea what graphics environment is being used here, but ours used a very *very *similar view using jMonkeyEngine)

@Ollinator;342206

aight, im just gonna throw in my 2cents

i’d say try it with instanced static meshes (with cubes as the meshes), but instead of putting ALL points into one instanced mesh, bunch them into several ones. like 10k per batch, and generate the batches in a way they’re close to each other (like every 40 degrees from player perspective or something).
reason/thinking behind: iirc all instanced static meshes are rendered in a batch, and so are not occluded by cam frustum; i guess thats why you’ve seen no performance increase using it before (basically rendering all meshes around you, even though you can see only a fracture; the ones in the 90° cam frustum). so breaking those up should allow for both batching them together and still occluding most of the unneeded ones…

makes sense? ^^

@RhythmScript;342244

Yeah, I can confirm that you can just throw thousands and thousands of instances into a level with essentially negligible performance impact, and I do this with 64 separate actors each of which generates a huge number. My advice would be 36 instanced static mesh components, each at 10° intervals, spawning an instance of itself for each point in that chunk. A simple material parametrized to calculate the instance position relative to the center point world space vector parameter and build the color based on that would be inexpensive, and using a simple cube with an unlit shading model would be quite performant.

Could you provide a blueprint example? I’m not sure how to put them in different batches/chunks. I can’t find any understandable examples on how to use instanced static meshes from searching around the web.

Here’s what I tried:

And here’s what it’s producing (very, very, very slowly…):

@Zeustiak;342323

That is pretty sweet. I am with the crowd that says you should deal with this in the shader, aka materials.

The exact implementation will be up to you but I am betting you could use a material parameter collection that updates based on player location and based on that location all materials update accordingly. So this could be one time, or real time.

If you look in my latest map generation thread, find the point where I first got the map bent into a spherical shape. That is all in the material, the whole map is actually flat hexagons. And I can scroll around and the map gets bent in a sphere based in the difference between the player location and any give mesh.

So for your scenario, you are going to want a similar setup where your material parameter collection updates based on player location, or really any vector, and each material would activate the lidar effect as required. Also your mat param collection will also need a value to act as the toggle to turn the lidar on and off.

It sounds like you already have the math worked out which is the hard part. Now you just need to get that into a material function and put that function in all materials you want to be affected by the lidar.

Could elaborate on what you mean by a “material parameter collection”? I don’t understand what that is.

So I would need to apply this material to every mesh in the level, not a global Post-Processing Material, correct?

I’ve experimented with a Post-Processing Material before, but it didn’t come out very well (couldn’t figure out how to “ping” it in one place to get the shadow effect):

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Sorry for the confusion, the Material Editor is just super confusing to me.

@Jamendxman3;342459

Just an idea, but using something like this you could make in-game explosions create a “shadow” of where a person was standing before they were blown up.

That is a pretty cool idea I hadn’t considered. I’m mostly interested in having a player navigate the “sensed space” without being able to explicitly see it.