Mesh.GetNativeVertexBufferPtr/GetNativeIndexBufferPtr layout question

Hi there,

I looked at the doc for those new methods and was wondering how they're supposed to be usable at all, given the lack of runtime-info on the vertex data layout.

In my case I would use this to sample meshes in a native plugin (their surface/normals/colors, etc...), depending on what's available, but I think whether it's for mesh generation or to read the associated data, those methods are useless without any kind of data layout descriptor...

Any chance for a demo project of this feature? I'm confused at the moment.

Cheers,

 

It looks like Aras has issued a Pull Request for some changes that show the API in use. Here's the change in the Pull Request (from this commit).

In case that pointer is helpful for finding a good entry point...

 

Thanks, the both of you.

Good to know. Another day as in "not for Unity 5.5" or as in "later in this beta"?

I think I'm gonna hold on implementing anything with these calls, especially if it's bound to change.

 

Out of interest, can you elaborate this a bit more? Are there any plans or changes you can share yet? A new mesh api would be very interesting for procedurally generated content

 

Thanks for linking the example Aras. In the native call example (SetMeshBufferesFromUnity) its providing a pointer to the vert array that was retrieved from mesh.vertices. Does that mean that Mesh.verticies no longer returns a copy of the mesh verts array but rather an actual reference to the mesh's underlying verts. Or is that array not actually used for the underlying modification in the native plugin code?

 

Can This plugin support android es 2.0?I build apk ,and change code,not work on mobile

Code (CSharp):

1. #if  !UNITY_IPHONE
2.     //#if UNITY_IPHONE && !UNITY_EDITOR
3.     [DllImport ("__Internal")]
4. #else
5.     [DllImport("RenderingPlugin")]
6. #endif

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NativePluginInterface.html ,ahmm...Have plan to run on mobile plateform?

 

Hi Ares,With test 50k dynamic verteces update,It seems Mesh set and get cost little big performance,Can this increase in Native code plugin?and Have any plan to support on mobile ?

 

1. WHY so low FPS with this plugin.
2.Build to exe,It seems not work.
Any Help?

 

OK,BUILD success.But why so bad performance using this plugin?Anybody used it?No Problem about performance?

 

I haven't built this plug in yet. But, if your using visual studio, make sure your building as release. I've had a lot of performance issues around custom native code that just came down to that.

 

It seems no way to increase performance

 

Hey @dreamerflyer, You should probably start your own thread to get this issue noticed.

 

Got it.

 

I'm trying to set up a fairly complex example of writing directly to the vertex and index buffers in a native plugin. I have some questions and this seems like an appropriate place to ask them.

First off... I'm not much of a rendering expert so I'm sorta fumbling my way through this a little.

Ok, so in my test I'm streaming in a mesh that includes point data, normals, tangents, 4 uv channels, and vertex color. There's also no guarantee that each frame has the same number of vertices, so it's quite dynamic.

Previously, this all works by marshaling the data from the plugin and setting the arrays in a Mesh for vertices, normals, colors32, tangents, uv's, and SetIndices, followed by UploadMeshData.

So, here's my questions:
- If I create a Mesh, mark it as dynamic, and get "vertexBufferCount" it returns 0. Do I have to initialize something first? I can get around this by marshaling my data for one frame then switching to directly accessing the vertex and index buffers.
- Is there a way to allocate a vertex buffer of a size that's big enough to accommodate any fluctuations in the number of vertices I have? I assume that re-allocating the buffer every frame would be a performance killer, but having unused space would be ok.
- What should my vertex data look like? Does it matter? Is there any way to get some sort of descriptor? Right now I concocted this:

struct MeshVertex
{
float pos[3];
float normal[3];
uint32_t color;
float tangent[4];
float uv[2];
float uv2[2];
float uv3[2];
float uv4[2];
};

So, all that said. I've at least got an exploding mesh working. I'm confident that this WILL work, and I could probably do it if I knew more about rendering

Any help is always appreciated.

 

Nevermind... got everything working. HUGE performance impact vs marshalling all the data as I was before. This will be a big win.