I imagine they’ll document it better once UE5 is fully out and explain how to use it. Currently the docs say no volume render targets even exist.
I’m actually pretty confident this idea of using a volume texture would work well. I thought about it some more for how to make this optimized and not just have a giant volume texture for the entire world.
Volume textures can get allocated on demand per chunk of world you explore. The chunks themselves could be something like 5k x 5k x 5k units, and each volume cell could be something like 500x500x500 units. This means you need 10x10x10 3d volume textures. I could even push things more and have larger chunks or smaller sub cells in chunks since that’s tiny. Maybe I can easily get away without even using volume textures if it’s this undemanding.
There will be a rule that any automap geometry can’t be bigger than a chunk that is representable by a volume texture and my material will take 8 volume textures in as a paremeter since that’s the worst case scenario if some object overlaps multiple cells. Then the material will use those volume textures to alpha mask the fragments in world space.
I’ll have to check out this idea of using niagara for possibly rendering in 3D.