I’m looking to make an asteroid belt. This will be a structure that appears in an overhead map context, not as something that the player will actually fly through. I don’t need a realistic field of rocks, but I want to cheaply fake something that looks good.
I expect I’ll need in the neighborhood of 100-200 asteroids, each maybe 5-20 px across on the screen. Big enough to see, small enough that I don’t need details.
I’ve tried the obvious route, populating a large number of very low poly objects. These catch the light in a realistic manner, but they are expensive in draw calls. Is there a cheap way around this?
A particle system (attached to a torus mesh, for example) would be cheap, but I need the asteroids to be properly lit - bright facing the sun, dark on the far side - and I’m not sure how to fake this with particles. Can I use a bump mapped particle?
Any other ideas?