How to render in DOTS without mesh renderer

Unity Engine
1

I started with the ECS tutorial here:

I understand this is out of date and I’ve been looking at the Hello Cube samples for more up to date examples. In the outdated ECS tutorial, it shows how to get a performance boost by using a pure ECS entity with no mesh renderer. It used a Transform Matrix component and a Mesh Instanced Renderer component but these appear to be obselete.

What’s the current way to do the same thing or is there an example showing this? All of the Hello Cube samples use prefabs that have a mesh renderer attached.

Thanks,
Reggie

2

Graphics.DrawMesh works pretty well.

3

RenderMesh replaced MeshInstancedRenderer.

4

Thanks but there’s no RenderMesh component in 2019.2 and I do have the Hybrid Rendering package installed. Has that been deprecated in 2019?

Also, what do you replace the Transform Matrix component with?

5

RenderMesh is still in the hybrid renderer package in the RenderMeshProxy.cs file

6

The tutorial is pretty old. You should definitly look at the samples from GitHub - Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples

MeshInstancedRenderer → RenderMesh
MeshCullingComponent → RenderBounds
Transform → LocalToWorld

All of these are valid in the most recent public version. (Hybrid Renderer & Entities @ 0.1.1)

7

Thanks for the info.

I don’t have a RenderMesh component but do have a RenderMeshProxy component. I also don’t have a LocalToWorld but have a LocalToWorldProxy script. Both of these are listed as deprecated though. There is no RenderBounds component.

I’ve got both Hybrid Renderer and Entities 0.1.1 installed so I must be doing something wrong. I click add component on the game object but none of these are found. I’m still new to DOTS so am I missing something here?

I’ve been working off of the samples you listed but I don’t see any sample that shows how to do rendering without a traditional renderer. Is there a sample that shows how to do this like the outdated tutorial shows?

8

You’re mixing proxies with component data. LocalToWorld, RenderMesh it’s not mono components, it’s pure DOTS components (IComponentData, ISharedComponentData). As mentioned above - look at actual samples repo and latest talks from Copenhagen and especially - conversion workflow for better understanding, how work with MB presentation at edit time and have fast entities at runtime.