Is it possible to draw a subset of the triangles in a Mesh?

Hello everyone!

When working in OpenGL, it is really easy to draw a subset of a particular mesh by using the glDrawElements method. For instance, I could create a VBO (with an associated element/indices array) and then call the procedure to draw the triangles formed by a subset of the element array (e.g., to render only the first ten triangles of the mesh).

In Unity, the Mesh class allows us to specify a set of triangles by their vertices and indices (which I assume are somehow mapped into a VBO and element array when running on OpenGL), but I don't know whether it is possible to tell the engine to draw only a subset of the triangles using the mesh indices array. Is there some method overload, such as Graphics.DrawMesh, that take an offset and count parameter and draw such a subset? Or is this feature considered too low-level?

I know that I can always copy the mesh and override its indices, but this is not an option, as I assume that there is too much memory overhead involved.

Thank you very much for your time!

 

Sadly, no. Unity uses subindex rendering for all sorts of things, especially for static batch mesh rendering, but they do not expose that functionality to C#. It might be possible with a native plugin, but I'm not sure.