In Unity4 is it possible to apply the occlusion culling for procedural objects?

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Hi,

we are creating a visualization system with millions of procedural cubes, and would like to know if in Unity4 we are able to use the occlusion system at run time using scripts.

Is it possible or it will be possible?

thank you

rp

Answer 1

Answer by Bunny83 · Dec 18, 2012 at 06:24 PM

No, the occlusion data has to be generated in the editor and it takes quite a while to bake it. Just read the manual on OcclusionCulling.

Also millions of objects would consume a lot memory just to keep them in memory. A gameobject has quite a bit overhead. Usually that's not a problem, but if you go for 1000+ or 10000+ objects it's going to add up quite fast. Each Gameobject has at least a transform and probably a renderer, material, ... If you just add up that you will have at least something like 500 byte per object. A million would be, well 500MB.

It would be interesting what's the goal of this. Maybe there are better solutions like "chunking".

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ripol · Dec 18, 2012 at 07:54 PM 0

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Ok, thank you for the answer.

Yes, the goal is to develop a visualization system of geological data represented by cubes, a "blockModel".

Right now, I'm able to display 1M of cubes at the same time using MeshTopology. But I would like to represent larger models using this limit using some kind of occlusion, but it looks that the occlusion culling of Unity can't be used in this case.

The "chunking" would be a solution, but we are looking other solutions like the occlusion culling..

rp

Bunny83 · Dec 19, 2012 at 10:39 PM 0

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Well, you could of course try to setup some kind of octrees and implement your own occlusion detection. However how efficient a certain technology would be depends on the overall scene setup. occlusion culling only works when whole areas are completely occluded by other objects.

This is great if the viewer for example is a player that can only walk on the ground in a big city. If the viewer can fly way above the city it's quite pointless to use occlusion culling for the buildings since most the time almost all are visible at the same time.

In Unity4 is it possible to apply the occlusion culling for procedural objects?

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