GameObjects sometimes do not appear until we "look" away (VR) and look back. VERY ANNOYING.

Unity Engine
1

We have a short VR Film we’re working on. Unfortunately it appears that sometimes, maybe about half the time, when we start the scene (looking at two “actors”), they don’t appear in the game. We can look away and they pop in when we look back, and they’re at the right point in their animation. In the scene view, when this happens we can confirm that they’re active, when we “F” to focus on them they will appear.

Somehow it seems that Unity isn’t drawing them, perhaps getting confused about whether it should draw them or not.

  • This isn’t an issue w/ layers or something – we’re experienced and have checked all the basic issues that we can think of. Again, this only happens half the time.

  • The objects are animated over a large area for a bit over a minute – we animated them in Maya so that we didn’t have to worry about physics or other animation issues in Unity. My gut is telling me the issue has something to do with this, but we are looking to confirm the problem so we can fix it and not have it repeat.

Any thoughts? THANKS!

2

AH. My amazing colleague figured it out:

“On the Animator component attached to the prefab, there’s a Culling Mode setting that defaults to “Based on Renderers.” If you switch this to “Always” the characters will animate even when they are offscreen, as opposed to on demand as the renderer sees it.”