Hi j00hi! I am terribly sorry for being absent, but it turns out that I forgot to activate the ”watch thread" option and after posting I started working on other things and I just missed to check back. To this day though, my concern about these volumetric lines is yet to be fulfilled and your new information comes as a valuable present!
When all started, I just wanted to be able to “draw” lines in Unity (efficiently) and I was not expecting it would turn to be the trickiest task I met so far. I started my attempts by using this solution I found of drawing meshes with Graphics class, in order to save the overhead of creating gameobjects. It worked, but the lines were oriented to the direction they were created only. I learnt that a more efficient way than reconfiguring the mesh in every frame the camera moves (for a billboarding effect), would be to let a shader do it. I then found your post, but I had this little issue with the joints. You’re absolutely correct that the method I used when I posted, was to create multiple prefabs. Of course, this is something I want to avoid and, probably, I was not certain of what I was doing at this time. I am still at the process of learning the basics, I would say, and although I enjoy digging into all the different challenges, I am nevertheless far from efficient with all these game developing requirements.
Due to my mentioned insufficiency, it took my some time to refresh my memory regarding my previous tries with VolumetricLines. I finally remembered that the result in the picture of my previous post would be achieved with the shader Mistale provided. When I tried to paste the code of your #5 post into the Additive shader, there was the compiling complaint of not having tangent struct. I then somehow managed to combine the code in #5 with Mistale’s shader without errors, but then the material would ask for mesh tangents. I finally added a class that calculates the tangents, there where no errors, but despite that the mesh was there (I could see the wireframe), there were no drawn pixels. I thereafter quitted.
Since my long research with the shader method had not yielded very good results, my latest attempt was to create tube-like meshes, with the help of MegaShapes since I had the plug-in already, and just ignore the billboarding attempt. Now, however, I am looking forward for your updated package, in order to test it. I would value your advice here of what would be the most efficient, performance-wise, way to go, in order to create a lot of lines. Tube objects (I am also currently looking of how to combine several independent meshes in one game object with megashapes) or one (maybe a few chunks of a) big mesh that contains the volumetric line components that create the lines and billboard them with your shader? Or would your shader work with the Graphics method as well (I don’t see why not)?
Finally, I thank you so much for your first reply and I am grateful for the upcoming package. Please excuse my lengthy post, but I considered it as a way to balance my former absence. Somehow…