Any way to NOT keep dynamic meshes in main memory?

[stevesan]

I’m working on a voxel terrain engine, and right now every time I generate a chunk mesh, it seems to take up VRAM AND main system RAM. I only need it in VRAM to render. But according to the docs, all dynamic meshes are marked as isReadable, which means a copy is always kept in main RAM, which seems wasteful. Is there a way around this?

Cheers,
–Steve

[Dantus]

@stevesan

I’m working on a voxel terrain engine, and right now every time I generate a chunk mesh, it seems to take up VRAM AND main system RAM. I only need it in VRAM to render. But according to the docs, all dynamic meshes are marked as isReadable, which means a copy is always kept in main RAM, which seems wasteful. Is there a way around this?

Cheers,
–Steve

The possibilities regarding memory usage are fairly limited for meshes. Setting meshes to be not readable was just introduced in Unity 4.2.

http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-4.2

Graphics: reduced memory footprint of non-readable meshes.

It would be extremely helpful if we were able to mark meshes as non-readable at runtime in order to free the memory. Maybe we should write that in upper case letters, bold and in red, such that it is seen by the Unity developers.