So I’ve got an issue where I open up Unity scene that has my main geometry (one of several) lets call it my occlusion scene, and I bake some occlusion data using the new 4.3.1 pro occlusion culling. At this point if I manually create a camera and use OC visualisation I can see that the objects are being occluded and their renderers being toggled on and off beautifully. This occlusion scene doesn’t normally have a camera in it, because the scene is loaded by a master scene which programatically creates my camera with my character, and yes my created camera has useOcclusionCulling ticked.
However, if I close the occlusion scene, load up my master scene and run the app (which loads the occlusion scene and creates the camera), the camera does not seem to find the occlusion data. When I select the camera there is no visualisation options. However, if happen to keep the occlusion scene open, I have created a temporary test where my master scene instead loads itself into my occlusion scene, the camera is created programatically and this time it somehow hooks into the occlusion data and occlusion starts work??
Soo… am I doing something wrong? all that I guess at is that the occlusion data is not being loaded when I load up my occlusion scene into the master scene? The game object with my occlusion area component is definitely being loaded up. But it’s like it’s baked data isn’t being loaded with the scene!!!
I can’t change the application structure to always have my scenes loaded into memory. I have a massive game here with many scenes that all need to use occlusion culling… any ideas??!
^^ I’m convinced that there’s some kind of bug with the occlusion data not being loaded with a unity scene. My unity scene file has increased in file size and must include the data, but for whatever reason its not picked up by my camera or vice versa.
I just tried turning the occlusion area into a prefab which is instantiated when my loaded scene starts, a long shot hope that it might kick the camera into gear now with a newly added occlusion area component in the scene. But that only made it worse… the occlusion culling stops working all together. So the only possible way I can get it to work is if the occlusion area is already instanced in the first scene that the Unity application starts with??! How is this meant to be usable?
seriously?! that’s seems like a serious oversight… let’s say you do have a huge game, that means you need to load that entire huge game and every level that the game will ever use into memory all up front, and unless you have a fancy streaming asset solution you’d also need to have every texture in memory.
Every game we’ve made with Unity requires some ability to manage what assets are in memory, this is especially important for mobile, and also our web player builds rely on having loaded Unity scenes in order to produce a near seamless loading experience. Otherwise you’d be asking for a massive game (in our case 300mb) to load up front before the user can see anything.
Can someone from Unity please confirm this is a the use case limitation of occlusion culling? If so I guess we’ll have to rule it out as ever being something we could use in real world rollouts of Unity.
Wow… I just found this… this sums up my findings and confirms that OC is basically completely unusable, has anyone even been able to use it in distributed product? It’s such a shame because the new OC seems so nice, it’s very frustrating to learn that it can’t be baked on a scene by scene basis.
At least some indication that yes, this is the only way it can be used, or some kind of guidance how I could actually use it. Seems misleading that you roll out a paid for Pro feature thats virtually unusable.
Yup, now you understand why me and others just stopped caring about the marketing gimmick that Umbra is. (if you note the date of the post… I posted it beginning 2012, at which point Umbra was out for Unity for over a year. So its been an issue for almost 3 years now… 2011-2014).
I did talk with some Unity engineers at Unite this year about that but there didn’t seem much traction to make it happen. There are a bunch of technical issues that need to be solved first. Hopefully they put it somewhere in their mental suggestion box.
^ well hopefully they do… but the new Umbra system was only just rewritten and would have been the perfect opportunity to make this change, so it seems highly unlikely to change any time soon… instead it’s a beautiful feature that you can play with in the editor, but not actually something you use in real world rollouts.
Seeing as the use cases for the functionality are so limited, it would be less misleading if Unity had of made umbra an asset store purchase… furthermore I’ve seen many responses come through to others support threads, but no one has offered any support or guidance on this issue, it’s only serving to extend my frustration. I wish I could get some kind of explanation at the very least about what the reasoning is for this limitation: technical / legacy support / cultural priorities like being too focused on peddling half baked unusable features?!
It seems you can do complete scene switches fine. Which is a whole world better than before. However that still doesn’t help out with scene composition and mixing different OC baking data.