Best Practice: ~600 planes with unique Texture

[ThomasRutzer]

Hi,

for a image-gallery-like project I need to display around 600 images on planes.
Currently I am thinking about the best approach

Plan A:
InstanceMeshes, with unique textures (if this is possible, maybe with 2D texture atlas?)

Plan B:
Render the meshes and one 2D texture atlas with offset

Plan C?
Maybe someone has a good pointer in a direction, examples, recommendation...

Thank you very much!

[drcmda]

600 planes with a shared texture but different uv coordinates would be doable. i dont know if instances can do it, that would certainly be the best.

[bhushan6]

You can do instanced mesh with different textures, I have made a small example of that.
But of of the limitation is that you can not send texture array as a uniform larger that 16 to shader so you'll have to send 600 textures in pack of 16. So basically 600/16 that is 38 texture arrays.
So i don't think you wanna do that.

[ThomasRutzer]

Hi, thanks for your replies! Especially for the example @bhushan6! I found something similar here.
But it did not mention the limitation of array lengths, and I did not know about that either. Do you think working with image sprites can help? The images I want to display are rather small...

[bhushan6]

Yes, I think in your case image sprite is much better solution. Because in my example you will also have to add 600 lines condtional code in shader which means extra load on shader and overall application.

[ThomasRutzer]

thanks again. I'll try to figure something out and post a possible solution here then

[bhushan6]

Yeah, cool. I hope you'll figure out something because it will be really useful for everyone.