Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial: Lidar Pulse & Echolocation Effect

Standard horror lighting is boring. If you want true psychological tension, don't give the player a flashlight—give them a scanner. In this tutorial, we are building a Lidar / Echolocation effect entirely from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.

We aren't using plugins or unstable "experimental" nodes. We are going to reconstruct 3D space manually using vector math. You will learn how to reverse-engineer the depth buffer, fix fisheye distortion with the Dot Product, and slice the world into a digital grid using procedural shader logic.

This is the "Hard Way," but it's the only way that guarantees total control over your renderer.

What we cover:

Reconstructing World Position: How to turn a 2D depth buffer back into 3D coordinates.

Vector Math: Understanding CameraVector, SceneDepth, and the Dot Product to fix screen distortion.

The Pulse: Using Fmod and Distance fields to create infinite looping waves.

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