Prevent Unity from serializing MeshFilter.mesh

Question

I'm working on a game that has hundreds of meshes on each level that are generated procedurally via a script. To visualize them on edit mode, the script that generates them has an [ExecuteInEditMode] tag, which creates the mesh and assigns it to the GameObject's own meshFilter. The problem is that when I save the scene file, each gameObject that uses this script saves the mesh information as well, such as vertices data and indices. This makes the .unity file huge, incrementing it's size by around 5x.

What can I do to preview these generated meshes on edit mode in Unity, but not get serialized when saving the scene? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I found a solution using sceneSaving and sceneSaved callbacks from EditorSceneManager. I remove the meshes from the MeshFilters on my GameObjects (they are called floors on my code) and save them temporarily in a cache. Then when saving is done, I set them back on each MeshFilter.

    static void OnSceneSaving(Scene scene, string path) {
         UnityEngine.Debug.LogFormat("Saving scene '{0}'", scene.name);
         
         cachedMeshes.Clear();
         var floors = GetFloors(scene);
         foreach(var floor in floors)
         {
             var mf = floor.GetComponent<MeshFilter>();
             cachedMeshes.Add(mf.sharedMesh);
             mf.mesh = null;
         }
     }
 
     static void OnSceneSaved(Scene scene)
     {
         UnityEngine.Debug.LogFormat("Saved scene '{0}'", scene.name);
 
         var floors = GetFloors(scene);
         var i = 0;
         foreach(var floor in floors)
         {
             var mf = floor.GetComponent<MeshFilter>();
             mf.mesh = cachedMeshes[i];
             i++;
         }
 
         cachedMeshes.Clear();
     }

Prevent Unity from serializing MeshFilter.mesh

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