Best way to render a large pointcloud in unity

Hello everyone,
We are trying to display a pointcloud from a list of Vector3's, and currently we are rendering each point as a cube which is working fine up about 300.000 points where it starts lagging. Therefore, we looked into other methods for rendering it, such as VFX graph and compute shader, however these methods do not seem very intuitive as beginners in Unity, and therefore we are wondering if the performance boost from switching to one of these is even worth it?

 

yes, those can easily render millions of points.

check also this
https://github.com/keijiro/Pcx

asset store has at least 2 point cloud viewer plugins (one free and i have one paid solution there).

*oops, didnt notice this was specifically in the VFX board.. but yeah, have seen vfx demos with points clouds, with millions of points, so certainly should try that.

 

I would definitely pick VFX Graph, it's much more easier route than compute shaders.
At least for your initial tests you could use the Point Cache feature in VFX Graph.

See the following link for information about the Point Cache:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...aph@12.0/manual/point-cache-in-vfx-graph.html
Point caches can be baked with the Point Cache Bake Tool:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph@12.0/manual/point-cache-bake-tool.html

But if you need to do something specific and interactive, then you probably need to resort to a combination of VFX Graph and some kind of compute shader implementation.

EDIT: I didn't notice you already had a point cloud in Vector3 format. Then you need to probably use a compute shader.

 

Why? You can easily pump data into VFX Graph

 

@andybak Yeah well it would be quite trivial to also use the Graphics Buffer now. I was too tired (it was late when I replied.)

 

Here are links to the topic: https://forum.unity.com/threads/com...fer-support-in-unity-2021-2-0b4-3123.1146284/

Basically you init a buffer, fill it with data and then make it available for the VFX.

Documentation doesn't have enough clues on that topic so it's better to check the thread above and check mainly this link from that thread: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/4109

 

fount this, may be more of a tech test, but seems interesting:
GitHub - pablothedolphin/DOTS-Point-Clouds: A Unity Package which provides ECS IComponentData types for storing point cloud data and a ComponentSystem for writing that data to a render texture via compute shader for the VFX graph to render the point cloud.