How would one implement dynamic textures

Development Asset Creation
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1

Hello everyone,

I am currently on a research team attempting to visualize DNA mutations in VR. I am being asked to create an interactable object in the shape of a ring that displays where mutations have occurred. (See sketch below)

The issue is the data we are using is:

  1. too big to save all possible textures in storage

  2. private information, which shouldn’t be dispersed

  3. running in VR and needs to be visualized with machine efficiency

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My first move would be to attempt to create dynamic textures for each ring. Each ring would reference a texture that would be manipulated from a c++ file. I am not only interested in c++, I could use the blueprint system.

How would one implement this? Should I be pursuing alternate solutions? I believe the use of dynamic textures is the best method for our project but I am open to new ideas.

Thanks to everyone for any help

340419-dna-sketch.png

2

So, schematically, the ring is all yellow, but you can interact with it and depending on the interaction, respective parts will turn orange/red, right?

What comes to mind is you can use a Canvas Render Target, onto which you can draw triangles with one vertex in the center of the circle, and two other vertices anywhere you want, so those triangles would be absolutely arbitrary and can affect any part of the circle. The Canvas Render Target, in turn, is used as a mask in a material.

Here’s a nice tutorial on how to use Canvas Render Targets and dynamically draw triangles onto them: UE4 - Tutorial / HowTo - Line of Sight Vision System - YouTube. It’s in blueprints, but I managed to do the same in C++ after some research, so it’s not too hard to translate into code.