Vectrosity - Fast and Easy Line Drawing

Hi Eric,

Installed the Vectrosity a couple of days ago. I want to tell you huge thank you. It saves so much pain. Used to use Unity LineRenderer.
Wanted to ask you a couple of questions...

Q01: In my script I have to redraw the line each time I change point position. Does my script looks ok to you or should I find a way to minimise a use of Updated function?

Q02: This is a base for road creation tool. Does Vectrosity has any methods to find multiple lines intersections?

Thank you

Code (CSharp):

1. public class DrawLine : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.     private NodePlacement nodePlacement;
4.     private List<Vector3> points = new List<Vector3>();
5.     private VectorLine line;
6.     public Texture lineTexture;
7.  
8.     // Start is called before the first frame update
9.     void Start()
10.     {
11.         nodePlacement = GetComponent<NodePlacement>();
12.         line = new VectorLine("Line", points, lineTexture, 20f, LineType.Continuous);
13.         line.textureScale = 1.0f;
14.     }
15.  
16.     // Update is called once per frame
17.     void Update()
18.     {
19.         AddPoints();
20.         DisplayLine();
21.  
22.         if (Input.GetMouseButton(1)){
23.             UpdateLine();
24.         }
25.     }
26.  
27.     public void AddPoints()
28.     {
29.         if (points.Count < nodePlacement.nodes.Count)
30.         {
31.             points.Add(nodePlacement.nodes[nodePlacement.nodes.Count - 1].Position);
32.         }
33.     }
34.  
35.     public void DisplayLine(){
36.         line.points3 = points;
37.         line.Draw3D();  
38.     }
39.  
40.     public void UpdateLine(){
41.         points.Clear();
42.         foreach (var node in nodePlacement.nodes){
43.             points.Add(node.Position);
44.         }
45.     }
46. }
47.  

 

Thanks!

1) You might as well use Draw3DAuto in this case rather than calling Draw3D every frame.

2) No, that's a pretty generic math problem.

--Eric

 

Thank you. Will take a look at Draw3DAuto in docs.

 

Hi,

I've been looking to find a good alternative to LineRenderer for a while, and Vectrosity looks great. However, I need to use HDRP for my current project. Does Vectrosity fully support HDRP?

 

Any chance we can get c# documentation? It's almost 2021..

 

Here is my Screen Space - Camera setup, with an orthographic camera drawing to a square render texture. I have a test line being drawn with points (0,0) and (1,1), worldPositionStay false, and useViewportCoordinates true. From the documentation
"Viewport coordinates can be useful in some cases, rather than the default screen space coordinates. With viewport coords, (0.0, 0.0) is always the lower-left corner of the screen, and (1.0, 1.0) is always the upper right, regardless of screen resolution."

This however does not appear to be the case. Although (0,0) is positioned as expected, it looks like some incorrect aspect ratio is being considered. I expect the aspect ratio here to be RenderTexture.Width:RenderTexture.Height

 

You can use custom materials for lines, so if the material supports HDRP, that would work.

It's had that for quite a long time.

Viewport coords makes use of Screen.width and Screen.height, so I'm don't think it will work for that particular case, unfortunately.

--Eric

 

How about ONLY that? The majority is JavaScript, which was deprecated in 2017.

 

Why does setting lineType to Continuous change the color to White?

 

It would do that if you were using SetColors, since discrete and continuous lines have different numbers of line segments, so there's no way to keep the same colors. It doesn't do that if you've set the line to a single color though.

--Eric

 

:thumbs_up:

 

Hi . I have a problem that needs help.
I used vectorline.setEndcap to draw a line as shown. however, some times it automatically saves a point drawn with an arrow and later when I draw that point also appears the same new line.
Please help me . sorry my english is quite weak

 

Unfortunately I'd need more information about what you're doing to have any idea what might be happening.

--Eric

 

sorry for my english.
I have used vectorline.setEndcap to draw arrow lines as shown. everything works perfectly except that on some occasions, my old line, even though it is already clear, still has an arrow point like my image(cache a point). And when I draw a new line, the arrow point saved from the previous line (the orange point is not related to the line as shown in the picture) is also re-drawn and appears with the line and it has nothing to do with the line.

 

Hello Eric,

Is there any way to have the line sizes appear the same on different resolutions or make them render in world space using a world space thickness? When the camera zooms in or out, or when using different resolutions, the line keeps it's width relative to the screenspace which make them seem to scale up or down relative to the world space.

Kind regards

 

You can do your own calculations to make relative widths (i.e. 2 pixels on standard HD, 4 pixels on 4K), but there's no world space thickness.

--Eric

 

Hey Eric,
I've been getting a confusing error for a while using vectrosity. Any idea what might be causing it?

Screen position out of view frustum (screen pos -nan(ind), -nan(ind), 99.998047) (Camera rect 0 0 1534 863)
UnityEngine.Camera:ScreenToWorldPoint(Vector3)
Vectrosity.VectorLine: Draw3D() (at Assets/Plugins/Vectrosity/Plugins/Scripts/VectorLine.cs:2221)
Vectrosity.LineManager:LateUpdate() (at Assets/Plugins/Vectrosity/Plugins/Scripts/LineManager.cs:84)

I'm not really doing anything fancy

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. public class LobbyOrbit : MonoBehaviour
3.     {
4.         public int orbitLineResolution = 150;
5.         public Material lineMaterial;
6.         public Texture lineTexture;
7.         private Vector3 up;
8.  
9.         void Start()
10.         {
11.             up = transform.up;
12.  
13.             var orbitLine = new VectorLine("OrbitLine", new List<Vector3>(orbitLineResolution), 2.0f, LineType.Continuous);
14.             orbitLine.material = lineMaterial;
15.             orbitLine.texture = lineTexture;
16.             orbitLine.MakeCircle(Vector3.zero, up, Vector3.Distance(transform.position, Vector3.zero));
17.             orbitLine.Draw3DAuto();
18.         }
19.     }
20.  

 

It works without errors here. I suppose it's possible that if you had extreme values for the position that might make the math not work due to limited precision, though I tried something like that and still didn't get any errors.

--Eric

 

Thanks for your reply Eric,
The numbers I'm using are pretty large, -42164 for z, and x rotation value of -3 so it could be a precision issue as you state. I also have a camera moving around the area inside of the circle but not sure that would have anything to do with it. camera values are like xyz = 46000,2194,-10131 with clip plane 100 near 200000 far when i get the error.

 

Those kinds of numbers don't really work well with Unity anyway; generally you want to keep coords within 10K units of the origin.

--Eric

 

Hey!
I just wanted to ask if there's a feature page or something for this asset?
I already own ALINE which is quite performant but it's mainly for debugging purposes only, it can draw in game mode but lacks a lot of features to be used as a vector rendering tool.
So, I want to know about the features of vectrosity, if it's performant enough and if it will suit my workflow

 

Which features specifically do you have in mind?

--Eric

 

If I'm using this asset I would like to use it for debugging as well because it will be a hassle maintaining both of them
So some important features for me would be:
-No GC Alloc for immediate lines and shapes(ones created per frame)
-Good performance for the shapes that are not static(i.e, can change per frame according to need)
-SRP Support
-Anti-Aliasing(in screen space UI as well)
-Some kind of gizmo equivalent(check out ALINE for reference)
-Shader graph support(Because I don't really know shader programming)

Some kind of performance graph and stress test results would be really nice

 

Hello. I just wanted to ask if its possible to make the lines look less jagged, I am trying to make some arrows for my instructions on how to use the game controls and the lines are in the vector canvas its on the UI space.

 

Creating VectorLines definitely has GC allocations since there's no way to create objects without that. You can create one and reuse it without GC though, which is recommended, rather than creating/destroying objects all the time.
It has as good performance as I know how to make; perhaps a GPU-based solution would be faster.
You can use custom materials so that takes care of SRP.
Some years ago, Unity changed the way AA works so UI-based lines can't be affected by standard AA (world-space lines still are). While annoying, this can be worked around by using a simple texture for the lines which effectively creates AA by using bilinear filtering.
There aren't any specific gizmo equivalents.
As mentioned, you can use custom materials so I assume that covers shader graph support. There's nothing built-in that uses shaders directly so it doesn't really apply.

Hope that answers your questions!

See above about using textures; this is covered in the docs ("Drawing Lines" on page 10).

--Eric

 

If I use SetCanvas to attach a VectorLine (defined with Point3s) to an existing canvas with a Canvas Scaler component, it works fine... until the viewport is resized, then the line positions break away from where they should be.

If I leave them in their own canvas (sans Scaler), it fixes that issue, but breaks my sorting order, since I can no longer place them where I need them in the hierarchy.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

-Scott

 

Hi, is it possible to setup onclick events on lines and curves created in the 3D world space?

 

Not easily, I'm afraid. You could try attaching a mesh collider component and using the mesh from the line as the collider, but I'm not sure how effective that would be.

--Eric

 

Hello,
I am wondering about how to use a cinemachine virtual camera.

If I SetCamera3d using my main camera - its fine



if i use a cinemachine virtual camera it does not work even if it is attached to the main camera.




I cannot set a CinemachineVirtualCamera with the SetCamera3D as a camera, I tried using it as a game object but that did not work stating it must have a camera component. This also caused Unity to crash in Edit mode while generating an exception.

 

It appears the points are not in the proper plane.



After farting around with it for.. too long, It appears cinemachine is setting the main camera (cinemachine brain) to zero in the late update then somewhere else its setting the correct position and rotation.

LineManager just so happened to be in between these two calculations even though it is at the bottom of the chain down in DontDestoryOnLoad.

By editing the LineManager from LateUpdate to Update, it seems to have fixed the rotation issues since the main camera has the correct transformation.

 

Dragging and dropping LineManager to the Scripts order page appears to be a better solution than editing LateUpdate to Update.

 

Hi. Thanks for the asset it's a real time-saver. I have an issue however.

Currently I am trying to draw the lines in between two types of objects. By default it is set as overlay so it draws over everything. I tried changing the canvas camera as mentioned in the documentation but the lines just stop appearing altogether. Is there a way I can render it using my normal workflow where I specify the render queue in the shader itself? Sorry if this has been answered before or I missed it in the documentation.

Edit : one more question, is there in built support to set the size constant regardless of resolution? Thanks

 

You can use VectorLine.material for a custom material. There isn't a built-in method for resolution-independent line thickness, but if you want that, the math is pretty basic.

--Eric

 

Hey Eric,

Thanks for the quick reply. So I did try setting the material previously but as mentioned it completely ignores the render queue as the canvas is set to overlay and it draws on top of everything. Is setting canvascamera supposed to solve that? If so, do i have to do anything else after VectorLine.SetCanvasCamera?

Edit : So I tried manually setting the canvas to camera space and dragging the camera when debugging and it works as intended. When I do this in code however, the Rect transform of the line have completely off positions.

 

Perhaps you could use Draw3D instead?

--Eric

 

I use vectorsity to render some 3d points using Draw3DAuto. I realized that the points are always the same size on the screen, independent from the camera distance. This is good in most of the cases. However in my case I want the points to be smaller when the camera is further away. Is that possible? Thank you for you support!

 

It's not possible, sorry; I'd suggest Unity's built-in line renderer for that.

--Eric

 

Hi Eric,

I've been tinkering with Vectrosity 5.4 a bit so far and really like it.

There's a special case where I would like to use it, but I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm using 2020.2 and would like to have a bunch of 2D lines within a panel (RectTransform), which are in front of but below some other elements inside that panel (plus they themselves are overlapping sometimes and need to be sorted - but that's what drawDepth is for, which works nicely so far, even though it is somewhat annoying to use). Basically, a schematic with some normal UGUI buttons. The lines should move when the panel is moved (i.e. their relative position inside the panel stays constant), and resized when the panel is - which I can get with a mix of LateUpdate calls to Draw and the Unity callback for rect transform size changes. When the size changes, I adjust all positions to account for the scaling and re-draw them.

Is there a way to properly sort it with other GUI elements in my panel though? Or are the lines always necessarily drawn at a specific sort order? I thought this might be a case for SetCanvas with a nested canvas, but under some circumstances, the lines are simply not drawn onto the other canvas that I've set up for that purpose (as a child of the original rect or as independent canvas, doesn't really matter). And I suppose the most important question: Can/should Vectrosity be used for something like this?

 

Lines are standard UI elements and follow the same sorting rules, which is that transform order in the canvas determines drawing order. VectorLine.drawDepth just uses Transform.GetSiblingIndex/SetSiblingIndex behind the scenes, so you could use VectorLine.rectTransform to access other transform functions yourself if that would help (e.g. SetFirstSiblingIndex/SetLastSiblingIndex). You probably need to use SetSiblingIndex with other UI elements to put them in the correct order relative to VectorLines.

--Eric

 

Hi Eric,Thank you for this great tool
When i draw a line with high width like 200 or greater . roundEndCap texture looks blurry and jagged in beginning and end. how i can sharpen it ?


Regardeless of this problem i tryed my own solution by increasing resolution of roundEndCap and ThickLine texture
blurry area has been gone but this approach created another problem as shown in below image

 

You probably have transparent pixels at the edge of your texture.

--Eric

 

Hi,

Is there a way to have a bezier curve with more than two points, and with 2 mirrored control points for each inner point of the line (screenshots below show better what I mean)?

I know that there is an example for multiple segments in the curve scene. But you also have these screenshots on the store and here in the forum:

• https://www.starscenesoftware.com/stuff/pics/vectrosity.png
• https://assetstorev1-prd-cdn.unity3...hot/8861dd35-098a-4c07-9429-705c08aa5764.webp

These make me think there could be a built-in way for multi-point bezier curves with mirrored control points (for smooth passing of the curve through the inner points). My understanding is that it could likely be built by separating the line I want into multiple segments, and mirroring the control points myself each time. But given these screenshots, is there a built-in way already that I am missing?

 

Yes, the included example shows a bezier curve with multiple points. The control points can be moved independently, but you could program it so that they are locked together.

--Eric

 

Hi,

I have an issue where I have a line for a golfball tracer that is drawing behind a lake in my scene. Normally I would adjust this with a draw order change and making sure the line is in TrasparentFX. I have tried altering VectorLine.drawDepth and this did not help. If put a 1 in VectorLine.Layer (TransparentFX is 1 in my project), will this make sure my line ends up in TransparentFX. Otherwise, how can I change the VectorLine so that it has a later draw order?

The line is being drawn with Draw3DAuto();

Thanks

 

DrawDepth only works on canvases, not with Draw3D. Since it's just another object in the scene in that case, the same rules about drawing apply as any other object.

--Eric

 

Unity 2020.1.2f1 - the package produces errors upon import.

 

Use the source code rather than the DLL. (The updated version from November no longer includes the DLL.)

--Eric

 

I had the latest version downloaded with no .dll inside. Seems that editor scripts weren't working so the errors disappeared when i've removed `Editor` folder. Not sure how it works after this, but i've managed to find another solution for my problem. Thanks.

 

Hej, this looks great. I've got a question. If I have a mesh that consists of only edges (and no triangles), would I be able to render this as a line with this plugin? How complicated would that be?

 

Unity doesn't seem to like meshes with no triangles (Mesh.vertices doesn't contain anything), so I'm not sure how you'd import it. You'd have to find some way to convert the data to something Vectrosity can use, which is either a simple list of Vector3 points for a continuous line, or a list of Vector3 pairs (where each pair is a line segment) for a shape like you showed.

--Eric