How would you do this?

Hey all,

I'm wanting to make an echo sounder in Unity for my fishing simulations.

Just wondering how to go about it? I was thinking of drawing pixels but it seems really slow. I thought about UI segments but it seems a bit backwards.

I already have the echo sounder script, i need to figure out the display.

Here's a video of what I'm trying to do:

Any ideas please?

 

Anyone?

 

i am not sure i interpret the video right, but couldn't you take a camera, filter out any objects not needed, set a max distance and do a render to texture ? with some vfx you could get a look like that i guess ?

 

Hmm, not sure that would work to good. Wouldn't get all the details and probably wouldn't see the terrain from a side.

 

you could get terrain in there if the camera is set to perspective and you limit the render distance so its would only sample a small strip
maybe not the best solution, but it could work okay
you could also build a special shader which would look like the sonar and use this on every model for the second camera

 

I think I would do it by making a camera render to a rendertexture and using a particlesystem to "draw" on it. If you don't require crazy high resolutions it shoul be more than fast enough. Depending on your usecase you can probably make it so that you only draw the column of new data on the right and shift everything to the left in an image-effect on the rendertexture camera and just not clear it between frames. I've done something very similar to "paint" craters and burned areas onto a global "damage texture" that is used by my custom terrain shader.