I am working on a digital twin project of an underground coal mine using PlayCanvas. I want to add airflow visualization inside the mine tunnels, such as moving wind streams or flow indicators.
The challenge is that the scene may require hundreds of airflow effects, and each airflow may have different positions, directions, and lengths.
However, I am not sure which method would be the most efficient and suitable for handling a large number of airflow objects in PlayCanvas.
Does anyone have experience with similar large-scale visualization effects?
Are there any examples, demos, or recommended approaches that I could refer to?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Thanks for your suggestion. I checked the Wide Lines example and it looks interesting. I think this approach could be useful for visualizing airflow paths.
However, after some testing, I found that integrating it into my current PlayCanvas Editor project is more complicated than I expected. I may explore other approaches first, such as shader-based flow effects or particle systems.
Thanks again for sharing this example. It gave me a new direction to consider.
You could also use a simple narrow plane or a custm mesh and add a texture to it that would have its UV channel animated to look like a flow. Here is an example:
Thank you very, very much for your help! This official example is extremely valuable to me.
Since my coding skills are still limited, I usually refer to ideas from ChatGPT and use it as an assistant when implementing certain features. For example, when I was working on the airflow animation before, I encountered an issue where multiple objects were affected by UV offset changes due to shared materials, even though some of the models were not directly assigned the script.
After some time of learning and practice, I have found that starting from official examples and then modifying or extending them is often a much better way for me to understand and control the implementation than writing everything from scratch. Finding the official PlayCanvas Animated Textures example is really helpful, and it has given me a clearer understanding of the correct approach for creating this kind of effect.
Unfortunately, I need to spend the next week preparing for an exam, so I probably won’t be able to test this solution until about a week later. I am actually very eager to try it out now, but I need to wait until the exam is finished. I will definitely test it carefully afterward and share my results.