Hello folks,
Background
As background, I am trying to view isosurfaces from a vtk file viewer (e.g., paraview) in UE4 such as that shown in the picture below:
Phase 1
In getting the behavior I want, I first created actors for each cell center. Worked great!.. until I used the whole data set. Apparently UE4 doesn’t much like creating 80,000 actors. Things run a bit slow. See picture below
Phase 2
The next attempt, was to create a single actor for each isosurface. So now I would only have ~10 actors. I figured a procedural mesh would be pretty perfect. I got the workflow tested on a sample script (below) which I got by following this youtube page: Unreal Engine 4 Guide - Mesh generation - YouTube. Note I am using the “Construction” tab but I’ve tested on the “Event Graph” tab as well.
When I move from the small sample to the real problem I get issues. I tried reading .csv files with loops but get >1,000,000 loop errors. I also tried to paste the arrays directly into blueprints like is shown in this video Unreal Engine 4 Guide - Procedural pyramid - YouTube but no dice. UE4 thinks for a while and appears to freeze.
Silver Lining
There does seem to be some promise here. I have tried constructing just one of the isurfaces (~13,000 sets of points- picture below). Again it was pretty slow getting the data in, and only the copy-paste method would work. Loops still gave errors, but once the data was in there wasn’t any lag in the game-play.
Pertinent Info
My dataset currently has around ~125,000 sets of points and data for normals, triangles, and vertex colors. I would like to scale to datasets much smaller to 10-100x larger. Preprocessing is a potential option but I’m trying to limit my data manipulation and number of tools in workflow. Currently I have paraview, python, and UE4.
Questions:
- Will procedural meshes work for my application? Or is the size of my dataset a deal breaker?
- If procedural meshes should work, what other way can I approach the problem to get the desired effect?
- If not, is there some other strategy? I don’t think point cloud will work as the exact position is important. this blog was related to this topic: Your thoughts on and comments to Volume Rendering in Unreal Engine 4. - Rendering - Unreal Engine Forums
Updates
1
I was able to test a little more of the >1,000,000 loop errors by increasing the limit to 10,000,000. However, when I run that version nothing is shown on the screen. But when I use copy-paste method things work (green bubble image). Ideas? No errors or warning are thrown.
Edit->Project settings->General Settings Maximum Loop Iteration Count