Questions on Hardware Instancing

[Bfischlin]

Hello Fellow Developers!

I am currently working out a way to use Hardware-Instancing. I have followed the tutorial on : https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/user-manual/optimization/hardware-instancing/ which is very helpful!

I got it to work in my application but I have 2 Questions so far.

In the link above it is stated:

Each instance of the mesh can have a different limited amount of state (for example, position or color).

I got how you can do instancing with position. But how would instancing with color work ? And could you do both at once ?

My second question is about the instancing itself. I am currently trying to spawn different trees in the same area. So far for performance reasons, I have only used a FBX which is a plane that has a PNG texture of a tree as a material. But now when I spawn let say 2 different type of trees. One tree is always rendered infront of the other. Is there a way around this problem, or do I have to use a real 3D-Model in order for the instancing to work properly. If so, won’t it be much more performance dependend than using just a plane with a texture ?

Thank you very much!

[Leonidas]

@Bfischlin

I got how you can do instancing with position. But how would instancing with color work ? And could you do both at once ?

Hi @Bfischlin, check the following thread on how to customize colors per instance:

Hardware instancing and color

Hi, I’m building a football stadium with thousands of moving plane primitives in the stands, that comprise a card stunt system. Each one will be coloured with a single colour, and will basically act like a pixel in an image, and when assembled together, they’ll recreate that image. I also want to be able to change the image, so in a “wave”, cards will gradually flip around and change to a new colour to reveal a new image within a second or two. I’m using hardware instancing, as explained here:…

For your other question instancing can work with any kind of model. What is important here is to enable instancing per mesh instance. So if you have two different models, you will have to go through the process twice, for each model/mesh instance.