GTA V Style light bulb LOD

D4N005H

Hello.

After reading the "Lights" section of this article, a question is rised.
The article briefly says that each light mesh has a LOD that consist of a 32x32 sprite. The sprite is then shows up when player goes far away from the light mesh.




(Credits for the photos: Photos are by Adriancourreges.com)

The question is, how to put the small 32x32 images into the scene? I tried to make a mesh and put an Emissive Shader on it and then make it as a LOD level 2 so that it can pops up when the player is far away, I also added a "Transform.LookAt(MainCamera);" script to it so it always faces the main camera. But it is just doesn't work well and totally worse than what GTA V does.
Here is what I did:

(This is technically a try to recreate those yellow polygons but I think they are made in a shader and not just the way I did, apparently.)

I'd be happy if someone could just help and write some hint about how to do so for the lights LOD as same as GTA V.

Thanks in advance.

Obscura

If you take a look at the screenshot with the wires, you can see that all of those polygons has roughly the same size regardless of the distance, so I assume by that 32x32 they doesn't refer to the texture resolution, but the screen space that it takes. So then you'd need a sprite that adjusts its scale so its always 32x32. You may also want to disable mipmaps on this texture so it won't decrease the resolution - fade into 1x1 resolution after distance.

D4N005H

Obscura said:

If you take a look at the screenshot with the wires, you can see that all of those polygons has roughly the same size regardless of the distance, so I assume by that 32x32 they doesn't refer to the texture resolution, but the screen space that it takes. So then you'd need a sprite that adjusts its scale so its always 32x32. You may also want to disable mipmaps on this texture so it won't decrease the resolution - fade into 1x1 resolution after distance.

Well in the article it is been said that it is 32x32 and then a 32x32 pixel texture is next to the statement. So don't you think it is a size of the texture? if no, then the problem would be how to setup the sprites in a way that they place exactly in the same position that the actual light meshes are, and also the other issue would be how to use render pass/fails so that the lights that are behind  an obstacle wouldn't have the sprite. I hope I've written clearly, though.

Obscura

Occlusion culling should automatically do that for you.

D4N005H

Obscura said:

Occlusion culling should automatically do that for you.

Ah so it would be easy somehow. Thanks.

The one and only thing I need is, how would I be able to make a screen space shader that shows a texture 2D in the same screen position as the 3d mesh is in world space position (obviously I'm talking about X and Y axis). Thanks for the fast replies.

EDIT: I found Unity's default Halo effect can do what I've mainly talked about here (with some modification,though).
However, I'd be happy to use a custom shader for it instead, so I may make a custom shader for it, if possible.