How detailed or full can/should my scene be?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,
That question may have been asked many times, but I did not find it by searching the forums. I want to specify, it’s not a “how many polys” type of question.

I’m currently developing a game where there is a huge house inside which I can navigate, with furniture and everything and from which I can go outside on a huge fenced terrain. I’m pretty new to 3D games. I can manage modeling and scripting, but I want to know what is possible or not. I would like to put everything in a single scene to avoid loading screens between rooms and inside/outside. Will culling be enough to get descent performance? Let’s say I am outside looking at the house. Will Unity try to render the entire house or will it stop at the first outside wall it encounters (let’s say there are no window)? In summary, I’m not trying to know how many polys will fit my scene (as it may vary greatly between platform), but how should I organize my scene(s) so I can navigate through easily?

Thanks a lot.

2

Finally, I found the “Occlusion culling” documentation (Unity - Manual: Occlusion culling) which answers my question. Thanks.

1 Like
3

You can also put your items in layers for the camera to render. For instance a spoon would not be visible at the same distance as a stove so you would put them on different layers lets say the spoon at 50 distance the stove at 150.So even if there is nothing blocking line of sight the size of the object will still keep it unrendered. Very useful if you wanted a lot of small objects and detail.

Then you just add code to the camera and voila here is my code.I have my camera set to a distance of 10000. the 5000 dist is for mountains. 1000 is buildings.50 is spoons etc

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class layers : MonoBehaviour {
    void Start() {
                float[] distances = new float[32];
                distances [11] = 700;
        distances [13] = 200;
        distances [9] = 5000;
        distances [10] = 1000;
        distances [12] = 200;
        distances [14] = 50;
        distances [15] = 10;
        distances [16] = 600;  

        GetComponent<Camera>().layerCullDistances = distances;
  
    }}
1 Like
4

I did not know you could do that! :slight_smile: Should probably use that in my mobile game somewhere, it could benefit. :slight_smile:

A way of turning off the renderers of objects in the distance would help too. (No need to render spoons when they’re 1000 metres away from the camera! ;)) I use this technique heavily in my mobile game to reduce the amount of poly’s and drawcalls passed to the GPU.

1 Like
5

Wow!! Nice trick! I hadn’t thought about layers and distance rendering. Thanks a lot.