Question Best way to optimize 800 cube

Hello , So i was curious
I Have a scene with bunch of cubes ;
Like 800 cube in one scene . it's just bunch of cubes in one scene with different textures.
They don't move neither have rigged body.
What is the best way to optimize the scene ?
like can you hide them off camera, or is baking the light for them is a good idea . would this increase preformance . Or is there any other way to optimize it even more to reach maximum fps .

would love feed backs

 

If the cubes aren't visible, they're already being culled automatically by the camera's frustum culling algorithm. What you likely want is GPU instancing and material property blocks.

https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/048-material-property-blocks/

 

If you have 800 cubes and you don't need to collide with them, I would suggest using DrawMeshInstanced. That would let you render all of the cubes using one draw call.

 

Do I hear Minecraft?

If you want to create a voxel world then Cubes and one GameObject per Voxel won't scale well beyond 100k voxels - no matter what you do. In fact if you save these objects to a scene file, you will run into serious performance degradation issues in the editor way below 100k game objects. All the while the size of the scene quickly explodes to several hundreds of megabytes.

Look into chunk generation, greedy meshing and for runtime generation/updates: DOTS (packages: Burst, Jobs, Collections, Mathematics - Entities could also be helpful if the voxels need to be heavily dynamic but I wouldn't recommend to start with it).

 

800 cubes for a voxel terrain would be too few, a 16x16x16 chunk alone would have 4096 cubes. (with no air)

 

Thanks alot for the replys , did researches and learned alot today .
For anyone wondering I'm new to modeling so i slapped bunch of cubes and models in one scene , i know it would be alot better to model everything in one large mesh but im stll new and it's easier and faster that way.

GPU instancing works but must have the same mesh and material from what i read.
DrawMeshInstanced was also good . doubled the fps

One last question , is there a way to occlusion culling without baking the scene ? There are too many objects to bake. This would increase preformance exponentialy.

thanks alot guys

 

There is a new dynamic occlusion system, but only with ECS at the moment and only as an experimental feature.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...phics@1.0/manual/burst-occlusion-culling.html

 

Another thing to try is MeshBaker:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/mesh-baker-5017

With MeshBaker, you can bake multiple objects into one object. It is one of my favorite optimization tools. MeshBaker can combine different objects with different materials, and then create one new combined mesh with one new combined material.

 

At this point, with no clear direction of the needs or purposes of these cubes, your best bet is to simply mark them all as static. Unity will then automatically batch them into larger collections of a single mesh at run or build time.

However as you’ve now discovered automatic batching has limitations, such as the same material etc, just like instancing. Which is why the purpose of the models becomes important, as that will guide you toward the optimal solution. Unfortunately optimal solutions often require additional work, rarely do you get anything for free.

In your case you could solve the batching issue either by producing a texture atlas that contains all the textures, or use textureArray’s ( though not supported on all platforms ). Both require effort either with code, shaders, or modelling. Someone mentioned Mesh baking which can produce the meshes and atlases automatically and that is a good approach, though you’ll have to find code or purchase an asset from the store.

So the question becomes are any of these approaches beyond simple static batching or instancing worth it? If you are just playing around, then probably not, if you want to learn or need the performance in a product then it will be.

 

Absolutely the most performant way to render 800 cubes is to delete all of the cubes and replace them with a UI text box that says "You see 800 cubes of various textures".

 

"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

 

That's is actually a pretty cool tool ! this can help me alot . definitely gonna check it out !

Wait so by making objects as static , this will boost preformance automaticly or is there extra steps ? isn't this the same as the MeshBaker In the previous respones or is it different since both combine objects into one mesh?
Also is using One large texture with multiple materials that has different Offset boost preformance or does it require code?

Yeah i can see that works lol

 

It is similar. Object will be combined, but they'll be combined into part of the level and become non-moveable. With mesh baker, I'd assume you'd be able to move the result.

 

Setting objects static and enabling static batching can boost performance. It is different than baking the meshes using MeshBaker. Static objects cannot move. Baked objects can move (or also be static if you want). I often use MeshBaker to bake multiple meshes into one mesh, and then I GPU instance that combined mesh at runtime.

When you experiment with batching, you will probably see that Unity's automatic batching helps but not as much as it should. Unity's dynamic batching is even less effective than it's static batching. I did a bunch of tests with batching years ago. I had one test scene with a thousand identical objects, and Unity's dynamic batching was creating groups of 2-7 items. Unity's dynamic batching was not smart enough to grab all thousand items into one batch.