Hello, I am making a LIDAR gun that rapidly shoots beams and I want it to be able to spawn thousands/millions (or a lot) of particles/sprites. My first iteration of the LIDAR gun consisted of spawning a tiny sphere instanced mesh at that location but I don’t think it’s the best way for performance even though my performance was fine. I am successfully spawning a scanning beam particle that starts at the location of the weapon and ends at the line trace hit but I haven’t found a way to spawn a single dot particle at a specific location. I was thinking maybe I could use particle collisions to spawn particles but I am not sure how performance friendly that would be.
Another question: I also want to have a couple of different firing modes. The first firing mode I made gets a random vector in a cone in front of the player so it wasn’t hard to get random scanning effect but I also want to make another mode where there is a scanning motion from up to down. I had some ideas on how to do this but I think you guys might be able to teach me how.
im not understanding fully what your final out come could be. But as for spawning a particle as a set location, you could have a Niagara system that spawns a particle at a slow rate, let it spawn a single particle(sprite i would guess) then deactivate the emitter. you could then move the emitter elsewhere, or use some sort of triggering to fire a single particle (with no velocity or gravity etc). just move the emitter as needed to new locations if there is many. You could link the emitter probability to a user parameter, switch between 1 for on 0 for off
So if you manage to do a scanning beam, what about making the particles sticky?
so 1 effect to draw the beam maybe, and another that only fires one particle per beam line that sticks on impact?
or spawn a particle on collision
i did some testing and a solution might be a second emitter and generating collision events, seems to work nicely
quick and dirty but desired effect? if you already have the beam down using particles then adding in the sticky ones is simple. have some sort of trigger or countdown to kill the particles after or a lifetime even
@High500 Your video is private so I cant see what you did.
But I asked someone who made a similar LIDAR gun in unreal how they went about creating it and this was their response:
“The dots are actually just a texture being written to render targets, which are dynamically applied to meshes whenever they get hit by the laser trace.”
Thats strange normally those links work. The render target seems a little overkill but yeah or even decals . The way i did it was to spawn a new particle on a particle collision so would use your existing lidar particle emitter let me check the link
Ok fixed it set to private like you said instead of unlisted
