Hey guys,
Im looking for some rednering advice, but please keep in mind im a little bit green when it comes to the complexities of rendering.
I am trying to use particles (or things that look like particles) to fly around in space but dynamically float to a invisibile mesh and wrap around it.
so basically, a bunch of stars will group up and form a mesh of any kind i need. So far i have got this working and looking pretty nice with Instant static meshes,
however im capped at around 10k instant static mesh planes. This is mostly due to a bunch of actors flying around the world working out where i should place each instant actor. Especially because we made them a pretty beautiful flight path to reach there destination (a nice curl effect so they kind of work there way slowly into the end destination).
i would be happy with around 20k ‘particles’, but am clueless as to what my next steps are.
is there a better way then updating the position of a bunch of empty actors, then updating the translation of each instance to map to one of my empty actors?
Thanks for your suggestions!
just an update,
I managed to optimize my code on the CPU to have 15000 instant meshes!
but really, the most expensive CPU computation is lerping my meshes to there location, i need a way to move this lerp onto the GPU-
Could a mesh with a material that displaces each vertex to its needed location- then another Shader to draw a point on each vertex work?
Any suggestions how this might be doable?
Here’s how to make a point cloud with particles. (Read the whole thread for corrections) Rama’s victory plugin contains a node that retrieves the vertex locations of a static mesh. You can store those locations as pixels in a CanvasRenderTarget2D(see my post on this thread for an example using them) You can draw pixels with the Draw Line node, where the start and end locations are the same. Then use it as a texture parameter in a dynamic material instance to draw your point cloud. Using multiple CanvasRenderTarget2D texture parameters you could even morph your point cloud by lerping between them. Let me know if you have any questions.
Edit: Make sure to set your compression settings to VectorDisplacementmap(RGBA8) in the CanvasRenderTarget2D, it’s under class defaults. Set your texture sampler to linear color.
Xnihil0zer0, that was a god like response, thank you so much. 
Ill update with how it goes!