Project Treadmill (LIDAR 2)

January 10, 2020

Continued work on the LIDAR inspired visuals. I introduced noise to the position of the points that increases with distance to simulate atmospheric distortion. I also created a simple character model from 3D primitives and animated its movement to better visualize how it would look alongside the point cloud.

Unfortunately the frame rates I was getting were still pretty low. This time it was rendering the points that was the bottleneck. My first version of this system simply created and destroyed a sprite for each point every frame, which was horribly inefficient. I tried pooling the sprite renderers, which helped a little. Using a particle system helped more, but assigning a location to each particle was still too slow. Finally, I created a dynamic mesh with vertices at each of the raycast hits. This greatly improved the performance, but I haven’t yet figured out how to re-create the atmospheric distortion effect in this new system.

Examples of the LIDAR effect

A more detailed prop (a collapsed version of the player character machine)

City street environment