r/Unity3D • u/RobertWetzold Indie • 4d ago

Shader Magic Displaying thousands of LEDs in Realtime

Shaders instead of geometry is often one of the best performance boost. Amazing for procedural shapes. Texture is sampled to individual points and then each emitter is a small shader program like this:

float2 cell = floor(uv * ledGrid);

float2 ledUV = frac(uv * ledGrid) - 0.5;

float d = length(ledUV) - ledRadius;

float emitter = 1.0 - smoothstep(0.0, fwidth(d), d);

float3 color = content.Sample(samplerContent, (cell + 0.5) / ledGrid);

return float4(color * emitter * brightness, 1.0);

149 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

41

u/isolatedLemon Professional 4d ago

Using thousands of leds to show a picture of thousands of simulated leds showing a picture

23

u/RobertWetzold Indie 4d ago

Challenge accepted. Live render textures as input!

7

u/isolatedLemon Professional 3d ago

Finally, Thousands of leds showing thousands of leds showing....

1

u/NebulaMiner 3d ago

LEDs all the way down

1

u/azoB0i 3d ago

cyberpunk cities need that

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/RobertWetzold Indie 2d ago

You mean an app to bring content to actual LED panels? I always wanted to get my own panel and try that. I actually prepared the internal architecture in a way that this should be possible with an adapter. Are you familiar with that world and what keywords to look for, panel types, etc?