Massive drawcalls with painting grass?

Unity Engine
1

Anyone know why this is happening? I’ve got a simple 250x250 test area where I’m trying to paint basic 2 layer grass across the fields of hills and its almost killing my entire computer and I’m getting draw calls on average of 1600. In my previous tests the draw calls did not do this to me and I’m confused on why this is happening.

Any ideas anyone?

2

I’ve posted a screenshot as well. Unity was not gaining sooo many drawcalls from basic grass painting before. Now the entire system starts to slow down as I do basic painting of grass across a simple terrain with nothing else. What gives? How can one do terrain work like this?

http://chasingthesunproductions.com/Yeshua/drawcalls.png

Thanks for any advice or help!

3

You have a second camera in the scene, remove it.

4

Never used grass before myself, but made a simple scene for a FPS project I’m working on and suddenly I have 600 draw calls instead of 30 or what I had before. It’s just a tiny fleck of land with some grass on it. Nothing is batched either.

I’m using deferred rendering with linear lighting, real time shadows, light probes and light maps. Not sure if any of that matters, but shouldn’t Unity be able to batch the grass or something? Seems odd that it would be such a massive hit on performance.

I’m positive I can recreate that fleck of land with grass in 3ds max and it will be 1/10 of the draw calls.

5

Thanks Wolfos I did remove the second camera but it didn’t change the draw call or slow performance at all. Twiik I’m with you that I can’t understand how simple 3d grass destroys performance so quickly with such little detail. There must be some tip or element we are missing here?

Can anyone else chime in on what might be going on to get such poor performance and massive draw calls from grass painting?

Thanks folks!

6

Bump.

Anyone know what’s going on with this? I can’t imagine this is normal. I’ve tried uninstalling unity and reinstalling. Also besides this issue the asset store no longer opens but crashes Unity. =(

Thanks for any tips or help!

7

Yeah…that IS a lot of draw calls.
Just some thoughts:

Can you show your terrain resolution settings? Also…if you removed the second camera, it seems like that SHOULD have dropped some draw calls.

Could you try dropping shadows, and try forward rendering, just to see what difference it makes? Also, if you attach the package (I don’t see anything that commercially purchased in your scene), we can see what it does on our end.

8

It seems like something may be preventing the grass from batching correctly. Did you change any settings for the grass material from your previous tests?

9

Deferred rendering doubles the drawcalls at least, but no matter what I do it doesn’t batch my grass. I can create a fresh project and it still won’t batch any grass. The terrain itself creates an ungodly amount of drawcalls though. Just a simple hill and it’s 200-600 drawcalls depending on the pixel error setting.

10

Any solution to this yet? I can’t believe the in-built Unity grass is this bad. I have 5,000 pieces of grass, which is generating 5,000 drawcalls. On the Xbox, in XNA, I could draw >32,000 pieces of grass into a single drawcall. What gives?

11

Im having big problems with grass and performance too. This is my terrain settings, what should I change to optimize it more?