Hey everyone. I have been debating a number of potential upcoming packages I will be developing in the near future. This morning I came up with my own theory for Occlusion Culling. I am almost 100% sure I will be able to put this theory into action. But before I do, I would like know your thoughts. Would you unity free users be interested in Occlusion Culling for a reasonable price? If so how much you would you pay for such a package? Would the Asset store admin’s be interested in this? Your feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
I would definitely be interested in an occlusion solution. It’s definitely needed for people who have the free version of Unity. Would you have different algorithms for the user to choose from whether they doing an indoor or outdoor game? Or would only one solution be needed for both?
I have a few solutions that are very simple. Theres a possibility there might not have to be any baking involved. Baking Occlusion Culling can take a very long time. Imagine a system where you add the script and it just works.
If you come with a good system that can be used with dynamics GameObjects, it could be interesting even for Pro users
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It would be useful for projects with an in-game editor, where we can’t bake the Occlusion Culling information at design time because the scene will be generated at runtime by the user.
Depending on how much spare time I have the next week, I may post some screens of concepts and rough script ideas. So stay tuned to this thread if you are interested.
I think the asset store has one solution available for occlusion (priced for free I believe), though I don’t know how good it is.
Based on your previous work I would definitely buy an occlusion solution for Unity free in the $10 to $50 range. Though I would be much more likely to buy on the cheaper side to be honest. I guess it depends on just how good of a solution it is and how user friendly it is.
Will this solution of yours be user friendly and have good performance on mobile?
Care to come up with a nice LOD solution for Unity free as well?
Thanks for the comment. I actually plan to have both LOD and culling. And yes, I want to have it as user friendly as possible. And, I do plan to make things as efficient as possible as well. With the current solution I have, the only thing that would really be slowed is load time(If its a large scene with high resolution culling). But I’m sure I could think of a way to speed that up.
I think there is actually. I should try it out to see how well it works. But think it is trigger based, in sections of ‘rooms’. I could be wrong though. That was just my first impression when I briefly glanced at it.
I tried a couple of Occlusion Culling systems in a previous project (I can’t explain in detail because of a NDA) but they weren’t very user friendly when you had objects moving around. One of those systems was trigger based, but I don’t remember if it was the M2h system or the other one (I don’t remember the name of the other product at this moment). The problem was that you had to group the objects in “rooms” and it wasn’t trivial to move the GameObjects between rooms at runtime…
I wouldnt even consider that proper “Occulusion Cull”. Thats just a set of boxes and triggers that turn mesh renders of and on. The theory I came up with is probably the way its done in most cases. It would be done with a big grid. All of the points on the grid gather the data needed to know whether or not an object should be visible or not. Although with this method, it wouldnt really be possible to make it dynamic and unbaked. If you tried to do that kind of processing in real time, it would slow your game down much more than any amount of polygons could.
That’s exactly how it’s done. The magic is in making and implementing a good algorithm for it.
For dynamic objects, usually portals are used. These are like the triggers, and are opened/closed at runtime. Basically, combining the two tends to work best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering
