Question What is the best way to render Two Point Hospital like data layers?

Hello everyone,

I work on a management game and I would like to do something really similair to the Two Point Hospital data layers:



When clicking on the bottom left corner icons, the rendering changes to show some data with color gradients on specific elements (floor, characters, items, etc...).

I tried to do it myself, but I don't know how to do that without changing the materials of all concerned elements.

How do you think it's done in Two Point Hospital?

 

i know codemonkey did something like that with minimap/minimap icons, but his tutorial is not in urp but that still should work for urp, hope that helps you, his tutorials always help me

 

Thank you for your help @Hazzel!

I watched the video you posted, but I think it's a little bit different from what I looking for.

Use a Canvas to update 3D object rendering seems too complicated and probably not really optimized.

In Two Point Hospital, I pretty sure they use a shader based solution, but I don't really if it's a surface shader, a compute shader or a post processing shader.

 

Is there a reason a Material-based solution wouldn't work for your game? Of course, if you're doing a Resources.Load call for every object every time you flip from the usual graphical state of the game to the visualise data/heatmap view, that could end up being slow, but a statically referenced Material that gets populated at the start of the game ought to be just fine?

If every object (in Two Point Hospital, the patients and doctors, the ) has an 'alternative' heatmap material that just has a white texture, you can use the colour option in the default Lit shader to completely wash it with whichever precise colour you want - green, red, orange, or some specific mix.

I do this for my management game across hundreds of objects, no performance issues.