Question Advice on 2D overlay please..

Hi folks.

I need to give my player a radar overlay on a 3d game. I'm currently using a culling camera with everty gameobject having a child 'radarobject' on another layer, so my radar camera only renders the object's 'ping' object, very simple geographic shapes. This (while not fully working yet) is ok, but I don't have the control over all the pings I want.

As all the objects are basically 3d objects I can't control a brightness or colour on them separately as you would get with a radar sweep. I can them a shader, but doesn't changing the value on one shader affect all instances of the same shader? Is there a way around this?

Alternatively, is there any way to apply a totally 2d overlay? Can I manually draw defaultParticle graphics to a texture and splash it on a canvas? Or even just splash it to a 3d object in the scene. Would I gain anything in control over colours?

I haven't done any 2d stuff yet, so my knowledge in that area is really lacking. Yes, I could go and study all the manual info and spend a week writing a load of test stuff, or I can ask here and hopefully someone could help me avoid the pitfalls I'll inevitably fall into.

I hope you understand what I'm getting at.
Thanks.

 

Use a material with an unlit shader for the "ping" objects. A material is a shader + parameters for the shader, so no you don't need the same settings for every instance of the shader in your game, you manage different settings with materials.

Alternatively, use a SpriteRenderer instead of a MeshFilter + MeshRenderer.

if these are objects that are attached to 3D objects it doesn't really make sense to try to use UI/Canvas elements here. You can use Quads with textures or just objects with SpriteRenderers to draw 2D stuff in 3D space.

 

The quads with a simple texture is what I need, I'm thinking old radar screen with blips, not representations of the objects. Well, maybe, but not detailed.

So where do you get started drawing 2d sprites in a 3d project? (Goes off hunting........)