I see this listed as a new feature in 1.0.1, but can’t find any documentation or examples on how to use it.
I am trying to set up occlusion for a large outdoor scene, and it isn’t working at all - but if I were able to specify everything manually, it seems like it would be much better.
Maybe it can help, when i run my game from Xcode, the console writes the following :
but dont know why or what “BoundingVolumeArea” does.
It is a bug but can be safely ignored:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=16945&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Dear Unity: new features do us absolutely no good when there is no explanation of how to use (or even access) them! 
I found the “bounding volume area” game object creation shortcut menu, but I can’t figure out exactly what it does. I was thinking that perhaps I could attach a bounding volume area component to an already existing mesh object, but that doesn’t seem to change anything either.
Ok, sorry for this. Joachim and I have tweaked the Warehouse demo to use this new functionality and we really need to update the resources project to reflect this so people can see how it’s done. The Unity iPhone docs definitely need some love too which will happen in the new year.
Ethan
Thanks!
I’ll check out the new warehouses project.
Edit: Umm… I don’t see anything changed. Are you speaking of the occlusion demo in the resources section of this site?
Would love some more information on these bounding volumes and how to use them, either via an updated Occlusion Culling project, or just explained here. I have an interior space with rooms connected by hallways - each room is stitched together into a large mesh. My view frustum is pretty narrow (30 degrees) and pretty short (30m far clip plane), yet the rooms still get drawn even when they are not within my frustum ( i can tell by the poly counts, and manually turning of the mesh of a room reduces that poly count, even though there is no visible change on screen since it was either out of frustum or occluded. Would bounding volumes help solve this? Can I just put a bounding volume around each room and be done with it?
Thanks!
-jdm
Stitching the whole room together as one mesh is actually a bad idea as it will disable the occlusion within the room completely. It will either render the whole room or nothing, which at best is an option with very small rooms but with anything where 2/3 is not visible when you are in the connection tunnel or a neightbor room, you are actively killing a large amount of the performance actually.
Reason is that occlusion works on object level, not on triangle level.
I assume, that even thought its not really documented yet, the bounding volume allows you to define when a given object is considered to be within “occlusion view” by using a virtual bounding volume instead of the geometry based one
Exactly, and the updated Occlusion Culling demo, which has been up for quite a while now, uses them for the boxes moving along the conveyor belt and the ceiling fans.
Ah, thanks for the replies! I didn’t notice the bounding volumes on the boxes and fans, I see them now thanks!
Yeah, my rooms are made up of enough modular pieces, all using the same texture atlas, and are low poly enough, that it is better to pay the extra poly cost of stitching them and drawing them longer than to pay the overhead of 30+ more draw calls. I did an a/b test and performance went down drastically with them as separate pieces, less polys drawn at any given time for sure, but way more draw calls killed it. Each room is about 2-3k polys total. So drawing several of them at a time isn’t the worst thing in the world. For the most part frustum culling does it’s job well (my camera is locked at an almost isometric-like 30 degree down), it just seems to happen later than I’d like… I’m assuming frustum culling uses an objects geometric bounding volume? I guess if i wanted to I could always write my own trigger script in the corridors to turn off rooms that I know shouldn’t be drawn anymore, even if they are technically still in the frustum, and then test it for any visible popping. (Also, I could try making my corridors a bit longer, to try to get the other rooms out of the frustum.)
Thanks again!
-jdm
Sorry to double post, this is related though:
It would be super cool if there was a way to show what was being frustum culled by the main camera in a scene view at any given time - sorta the same way that the occlusion view mode works, but for frustum culling too, where the objects would disappear if the main camera was not drawing them due to frustum culling. That would definitely help me at least place my rooms/corridors more optimally
-jdm
/maybe I just like saying ‘frustum’ 