I’m trying to understand the engine’s pipeline and where we should access the vertex data of static/skeletal-meshes. It’s a bit convoluted without any proper documentation.
Where are we suppossed to get the vertex/index buffers so that we can, for example, use it in compute shaders? I’ve read about there being proxies like the FStaticMeshSceneProxy which are mirrors of the UStaticMeshComponent existing on the render-thread. Do we get the scene-proxy and pass it to the render thread where we can access these buffers and send them to the GPU for processing?
For context, I have my own custom 3d navigation mesh which is currently being generated by the CPU. The voxelization part however is pretty slow as it uses the world-overlap check. I optimized it pretty well but there is only so much we can do with that approach as it just has too many iterations for the CPU to handle if the world gets bigger. So I thought about doing the voxelization part on the GPU, but I have zero experience with unreal’s rendering pipeline, and how all of this is put together.
Can we hook into the existing pipeline where the buffers are ready to be used, or do we manually get these buffers ourselves directly from the components? I really appreciate any help!