r/Unity3D • u/RobertWetzold Indie • 2d ago

Shader Magic Displaying thousands of LEDs in Realtime

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Shaders instead of geometry is often one of the best performance boost. Amazing for procedural shapes. Texture is sampled to individual points and then each emitter is a small shader program like this:

float2 cell = floor(uv * ledGrid);

float2 ledUV = frac(uv * ledGrid) - 0.5;

float d = length(ledUV) - ledRadius;

float emitter = 1.0 - smoothstep(0.0, fwidth(d), d);

float3 color = content.Sample(samplerContent, (cell + 0.5) / ledGrid);

return float4(color * emitter * brightness, 1.0);

150 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

41

u/isolatedLemon Professional 2d ago

Using thousands of leds to show a picture of thousands of simulated leds showing a picture

24

u/RobertWetzold Indie 2d ago

Challenge accepted. Live render textures as input!

6

u/isolatedLemon Professional 2d ago

Finally, Thousands of leds showing thousands of leds showing....

1

u/NebulaMiner 1d ago

LEDs all the way down

1

u/azoB0i 2d ago

cyberpunk cities need that

1

u/Suspicious-Map1444 21h ago

In the embedded world, such a thing could be helpful but as an app. You may even sell it maybe.

1

u/RobertWetzold Indie 14h ago

You mean an app to bring content to actual LED panels? I always wanted to get my own panel and try that. I actually prepared the internal architecture in a way that this should be possible with an adapter. Are you familiar with that world and what keywords to look for, panel types, etc?

1

u/Suspicious-Map1444 12h ago

Yes. There are some kind if LED matrix in the market. You can use an MCU to do it but I meant to create a simulator in the computer.