I can think of too many ways to implement this.

Unity Engine
1

I have a turrets that have three little light bulbs - which should light up depending on how much power the turret is getting(so controlled from script) . I want to have roughly 15 of these turrets on-screen so performance is worth thinking about.

Should I create the effect with shader magic? this is how I would do it in UDK… but unity does not have cozy shader editor and writing one myself might not be very efficient workflow for such simple thing.

I wonder if in unity I should have the light bulbs as separate mesh from the object and change material on it from scripts… or hide and replace object with lit light bulb?

can good results be achieved without messing with materials at all and using real lights?

Please let me know what is a good workflow to achieve this in unity.

Thanks ahead of time :slight_smile:

2

Strumpy’s Shader Editor is open source, and there’s also Shader Forge.

I suspect you could use a built-in shader, though. They’re fairly customizable for things like this. Using shaders would probably be more efficient than 15 x 3 actual point lights.