Improve performance whilst using a TON of objects

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So I’m currently working on a project where I’m importing GIS soil sample data into unity. I’m going to be visualizing it using a voxel/minecraft like system, where each voxel is a soil sample.

I’ve got a good system working so far, at a same scale that is. When I tried to use one of our raw files converted to image layers (about 300x300 for each image), it crashed unity and the computer when it tried to render it.

In my tasting I used 3 16x16 images for 3 dummy layers, this ran OK, but the performance wasn’t too good with all the colliders (colliders are necessary for click detection), and all the primitive cube instances.

I don’t think object pooling is really an option here. My one thought was to turn it into one big mesh, but I have no idea how I would even start going about doing that.

Is there a way I can improve performance while still using a ton of cubes and colliders?

Physics colliders are expensive and should generally be used sparingly. There isn't really a good way to use 90,000 of them at once.

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@cjdev I understand that they're expensive, but is there a way to help tune down how expensive they are?

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Definitely not to the extent you need for your purposes as the physics engine has a set overhead for each one to check for intersections. You'd be much better off rolling your own system I think.

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@cjdev okay, thanks

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@cjdev Even without colliders, just using a plain cube, it still crashes/freezes Unity. Any idea on how to improve performance when just handling a ton of objects?

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1 Answer

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You mentioned voxels, but then described a system of cubes and colliders…? the first approach might work, but the second definitely will not.

I would create a texture in which each pixel encoded the soil sample as a RGB value, then apply a single collider to the mesh that looked up the colour corresponding to a textureCoord of a raycast where clicked

I'm using the term voxels to help describe my system of cubes and colliders. I'll have a look at your suggestion tomorrow

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@tanoshimi - doesn't unity have any raster/image formats that support floats or longs as pixel values - which he could use instead of the RGB hack?

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@lancer Then you're using the wrong word. Minecraft would never work if it was built out of cubes and colliders! @allergenx You could use use RGB value as an index into a lookup table rather than encoding the value directly.

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