Providing set of Vector3 to NodeMaterial

Questions
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Hi there!

I have a question RE performance and approach. I want to provide set of Vector3 to the NodeMaterial. And I made it but I guess in some…specific way :sweat_smile:. What I’ve done:

  1. Creating the raw texture with data about points in space
  2. Providing this data through the texture in NodeMaterial
  3. Getting “live” vectors from the texture using loop inside NodeMaterial

I got the visual that I want. But I faced with performance issue. When I have like 1-10 spheres it is fine. But when I add like 1024 or so I see that shader takes like 5.6-6ms on RTX 3080. Sooo…I seeking for help to improve approach in data providing to NodeMaterial. Because of cycle (I quess) inside NM I loose a lot of performance. If anybody knows how I can handle it please, help me) :folded_hands:

This is PG with working solution:

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Hello !

First of all, I have to say I like the barcode idea :joy:
Setting up the ground texture to this real time data stream is crazy, ahah

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Do you absolutely need to stick to node material ? Because I feel like this could be easier using GLSL custom mat…

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Yeees…I need it with NodeMaterials. But I also interested in

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in … ? Do you mean in custom GLSL version ? If yes, here is a way :

Is it faster on your side ?

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Sorry))) I thought I finished the message :sweat_smile:

Unforunatelly no( Almost the same. I made a mistake in my post I got 5.6-6ms for 2048 points. With 1024 it was like 2-2.5 ms. And it is very close to performance in your pg. But thank you anyway

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I don’t think there’s a solution with the current algorithm, as there’s a loop of 1024 iterations for each pixel, and no way around that…

If you are restricted to a plane (as in your PG where the Y coordinate is fixed), you may try to devise an algorithm that would use the X/Z position of each sphere as a coordinate inside a texture, and draws the influence of each sphere in the texture additively. It would probably be easier to do it in WebGPU with a compute shader… In the end, you would simply apply the texture to the plane.

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I thought about such an approach. But unforunatelly I planning to have a very big plane. What I could do is update this texture depend on where am I in space. It will works but I wanted to implement it other way. Because I may want to go by Y coordinate in some cases. Anyway for now XZ will be enough for me. I will close this topic for now and open it again if I will have more questions. Thanks for your replies, guys :slightly_smiling_face: