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Instancing with TOPs is a supercharged workflow that unlocks working with hundreds of thousands of instances. This technique is often used in combination with point cloud workflows or other point-based manipulation networks. One limitation of instancing with TOPs is the data constraint of textures. Generally speaking, TOPs contain up to 4 channels of data: red, green, blue, and alpha.
While we typically think of these channels as containing color information, we can use the data in TOPs for any type of operation. When planning TOP-based instancing networks, it’s often helpful to consider how your data is grouped together. For example, you may want to break color data away from position data so that you can scale them separately.
You may also want to keep a close eye on your pixel format when working with instance data in TOPs. Many TOPs will default to an 8-bit pixel format. For data other than color, you may want to change this to 16 or 32 bits to prevent unintended quantization. You may also want to pay close attention to smoothing as anti aliasing and input smoothness parameters can have unintended behaviors when working with textures as positional data.