Mesh Baker by Digital Opus [RELEASED]

Community Showcases
21

WOW. Combine Skinned meshes. That’s just awesome!

BTW, your Asset Store link at the original post is broken.
The correct link is this now :

22

Thanks for the heads up on the asset store link.

23

nice, going to get it

24

Here is a youtube video showing Mesh Baker combining multiple skinned meshes with animations intact and customizing the characters by adding a sword, hat and glasses to one of the meshes.

25

I have a large city environment and the drawcalls are 150 with 250 saved by batching. I assume this would help reduce those drawcalls by combining the buildings and trees?

Any idea what kind of difference it would make?

26

Hmm, i bought this and after having to change my textures to truecolour, I get the following error when trying to combine meshes.

27

Hmm, it appears that one of your meshes does not have normals. This is something I hadn’t tested for. Which version of MeshBaker are you using? I can send you a fixed file and will get a new version up in the Asset Store ASAP. Do you want to PM me with an email address?

28

Thanks, I’m using the current version from the Asset Store.

I’ll PM you my email addy. :slight_smile:

29

Hello…

Does this works with Prefabs? I mean, I want to use it with objects I need to instantiate at runtime… like spawning objects/npcs, etc…

Thanks

30

Yes, it can accept prefabs in the list of objects to combine. This is normally used to adjust mesh assets for static/dynamic batching. In your case the usage would probably look like (there is an example scene that does exactly this):

  • Use a TextureBaker to create a combined material in the editor from all possible NPC/objects.
  • At runtime create a MeshBaker object and give it the combined material
  • Add NCPs by Instantiating them then adding them to the combined mesh
  • After adding each object you probably want to keep it around with its Renderer disabled so that its physics collider remains in the scene and any scripts on the object continue to run.
  • Remove objects by removing them from the combined mesh then Destroying the object
31

Nice, thanks, looks a good tool that I need.

32

A few little suggestions:

  • Give the new baked in place objects the same tag and layer as the source object.
    ( the ones that are using the same shader with the new mesh but are not combined )
  • Automatically use the same shader as the source object.

The interface could benefit from having its own window, at the moment there is a lot of searching for the mesh baker in the hierarchy that could be prevented by having an open window, or docked in another tab.

Happy to say that I got my first skinned mesh baked with success! :slight_smile:

ps I have some problem with light mapping the baked meshes, there are shadows in the wrong places, maybe it needs light map UVs?

33

Thanks for the suggestions Laars, I just submitted a new version to the asset store that addresses the lightmapping issue. It also fixes problems if channels are missing.

Your other suggestions are good ones, and should not be too difficult to implement. I love getting feedback on peoples experiences so that I can keep improving it.

34

Mesh Baker 2.1 is now available. New features:

  • Can preserve lightmapping on objects when baking into a combined mesh
  • Can create a lightmapping UV layout on the combined mesh so it can be lightmapped
  • Can control which mesh channels are generated in the combined mesh
  • If channels in objects to be combined are not present then default channels are automatically generated.
35

Mesh Baker 2.1.1 is now available.

New features:

  • All the inspector fields are now available in a separate editor window. This makes it easier to drag assets and objects to fields.
  • Tags and Layers are preserved in the combined mesh if all source meshes use the same tag and layer

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed an error message that is generated if Build is set to Web Player
36

Hello again, last question: how does this works with Occlusion Culling? Because, if I put, for example, 4 boxes together in your backer, the occlusion will consider this a one object only, right? And so, I cannot use occlusion like it was mean… is that right?

Any test on this?

Thanks

37

Mesh Baker can “baker meshes in place” which works with occlusion culling and static/dynamic batching. It works like this:

  • Mesh Baker creates atlases and a combined material for a list of source objects
  • Mesh Baker duplicates the the meshes on the source objects, adjusting the UVs so they can all share the combined material. These meshes are saved as assets.

You can now update your objects to use the duplicated meshs and combined material. Unity’s static batching (which does work with occlusion culling) will combine meshes based on what is visible at runtime. You will need Unity Pro to take advantage of occlusion culling and static batching.

If you combine all the meshs into a single big mesh then you are correct, Occlusion Culling must either cull the whole combined mesh or render the whole combined mesh.

38

Is this runtime combined or preprocess in editor?

39

You can choose to either preprocess in editor, or combine at runtime.

Combining at runtime requires scripting, it is quite powerful. The API is detailed on this page. You can add, remove and update meshes in a combined mesh. This is particularly useful for customizing skinned meshes (adding weapons and armor, hats etc…). If you want to combine at runtime it is a good idea to pre-process the combined material since that is slow, but combining meshs is fast enough to do in-game.

40

Could you make a quick video showing some examples of the kind of performance boost this tool can provide please?

e.g. A normal scene with a large number of visible meshes and skinned meshes and a frame rate counter showing the FPS, then the same scene with the meshes/skinned meshes “baked” so we can see the improved frame rate.