Eta on mesh manipulation in jobs?

[tertle]

I’ve posted this numerous times but you can already edit meshes in jobs (much faster than their demo as well).

Using ECS to update a mesh.

You can already do high performance mesh manipulation in jobs, but I’m not sure how you can really get around the bottleneck of pushing your mesh data back to the GPU. Here’s a demo of what I’ve been working on at the moment with meshes. Generating (greedy) meshes on the fly while doing back face culling every frame. [Unity ECS + Job Voxel Engine Test with Greedy Meshing and Back Face Culling.]

Allow setting mesh arrays with NativeArrays.

You can actually modify arrays (int[ ] and Vector3[ ] etc) within jobs using pointers. This is not great but at the moment it's the best work around to avoid the slow copy (a magnitude of performance increase.) keijiro has an example of github: https://github.com/keijiro/Firefly The general idea is this [BurstCompile] private struct GenerateMeshJob : IJob { // ... // basically a wrapper for a int pointer, from https://github.com/keijiro/Fire…

You bring up 2 important points though

• Having to set vertices

This is expensive, but this could well be the cost of this is pushing the mesh data to the GPU, if so jobs are probably not going to help that much. What would be nice is an async mesh job, similar to the AsyncGPUReadbackRequest we got recently for when we don’t care if takes a couple of frames to update a mesh.

• Recalculate normals

This is something that could be jobified (internally within Unity at the very least) to speed it up. For now though it’s just much faster to calculate your own normals.

Regardless of these 2 points, as it stands the job system is fast enough to edit a lot of meshes per frame.

All this goes out the window though if you use mesh colliders. Updating them destroy your fps.