Drawing lines and circles in 3D space

Development Rendering
, , , , ,
1

What is the proper approach to draw primitive 2D shapes like lines and circles and more complex curves in 3D space?
Please note I don’t mean the debug lines but for actual game-play visuals.

Example, I want to draw the orbit of a planet around the sun. Now consider that the orbit is not circular but defined by some equation , How do I do that?

I would Also Like to add some material to the orbit shape so its like glowing and stuff.

2

You can create your base shapes as static meshes in a 3D modelling program and use instance static mesh components to draw them, this approach might me less flexible and shapes you can draw (it depends on your base static meshes you have) but will give you very good performance. Another way would be generating the mesh component procedurally, you then have to code the algorithms that create the meshes, this approach will be less optimized in terms of mesh instancing but you will be able to draw any shape you want.

EDIT: I’ll mark the issue as resolved. Please if it is not just post a comment and I’ll be more than glad to further provide assistance.

3

Do you still assistance on the issue?

4

yes , sorry for such late response. I’m working on a mobile project so performance is very important! what do you think of using splines?

5

They should not have such a big overhead. Test them out and see if the performance is ok in your case.

6

Sorry what are you referring to by “They” splines or procedural mesh?

7

Splines, a procedural mesh is also not expensive and from 4.7 (or 4.6) they support collisions too. 4.8 would be best for procedural meshes because you can handle them in BP now.

8

That’s some nice info that I didn’t knew especially procedural mesh in BP, I’ll give it a try and post back the results, then this question can be closed

9

Nice! Procedural meshes are a lot of fun to play with!