Description
Metaballs are easy to implement, but hard to optimize. This solution is robust, performant, and customizable- all through a single material parameter collection. This package is very easy to set up and configure for beginners or artists- read the documentation here.
For those technically minded- this is a Bezier-clipping metaball renderer running in the pixel shader. One of the most expensive parts of any metaball renderer is figuring out which balls the ray intersects, so, it uses tiled binning to reduce the number of potential hits. Metaball actors are placed in the scene and manipulated, then their position and radius are sent to a Master actor, which in turn uses a Niagara particle system to write all that data to a pair of render targets. Those then, are read by the shader, and rendered on-screen.
This code is battle-tested and running live in a real, published game. Try it out now and see if it's a good fit for your project!