Graphics [RELEASED] Perfect Culling - Pixel Perfect Occlusion Culling

I was unable to reproduce your problem (I'm not seeing the error and I'm also not seeing the changed hash warning). Could you try to reproduce it in a simplified scene and send it to me? Also make sure you are using the most recent version of Perfect Culling.

This issue could potentially also happen if the Renderer was dynamically generated by a script (maybe that is why you see the hash changed warning?). A missing Renderer is also the only time this error message would show up. In the past the asset would also show it for missing MeshFilter or Meshes but it just skips over them now. Concluding that the error message is not correct and you definitely ended up with an invalid Renderer for some reason.

If you can and want to dig into it some more on your own you can look into the CollectMeshStats method inside the PerfectCullingBakeGroup.cs script. It should also print a warning that says "Detected missing renderer".

 

Definitely can't get this to work, it culls worse than Unity's OC.
If I add a high number of cell size it culls like 30% (culling things randomly even with the same settings and not culling things where the player has no vision). If I reduce the number of cells it culls 86%, but it's much worse it culls things where the player has vision, so it culls objects that shouldn't be culled and it doesn't cull objects where the player have no vision.

I have been trying with multiple volumes. Merging-downsampling iterations. No results.

 

Have you already looked into the Troubleshooting documentation that is located in the Docs folder? It explains how to debug culling issues and describes some common problems.

The behaviour you are describing sounds like something might block the view. You should also make sure you only have one PerfectCullingVolume and one PerfectCullingCamera. Anyway it is hard for me to say what is causing your specific problem. However if you can reproduce it in a simplified scene and send it my way I'd be more than happy to help to identify the problem.

 

Hi! I tried adding transparency by the PerfectCullingRendererTag component but it does not seem to work. I have a sphere mesh with the default material and I added the PerfectCullingRendererTag component to it and forced the bake render mode to be transparent and double-sided in the sample scene Demo_UnityBehaviours. However, the sphere is still considered as an occluder in this case (and by adding transparency it should not occlude anything) as objects behind the sphere will still be culled. This is more clear if you move the camera inside the sphere. I checked the setting and "renderTransparency" checkbox is checked. And to help with light culling I do need the double-sided function to work. Can I get any help on this? Thanks!

 

Hey,

Thank you for reporting the issue and providing an example that reproduces it. Very helpful!

I sent you a PM with an updated file that hopefully fixes the problem. By the way you can also enforce transparency on a per material basis by including "pc_trans" in the name. That should actually workaround the issue, too. Anyway the updated file sent via PM hopefully takes care of the root cause here.

 

Sorry, I wasn't able to make a simplified scene as my scene is too complex. I'll try to post some images in the next days

 

Hi.

I could not figure out from the documentation how to bake into a prefab.

The asset's feature "Support for baking prefabs that are spawned dynamically" means that you can bake to prefabs, unlike Unity's built-in occlusion culling that bakes to scenes. Is that correct?

 

Yes. You can bake occlusion data for a prefab in the Unity Editor and load it at run-time.
There is some limitations for instance the occlusion will be constrained and the camera location clamped to the bounds of the prefab itself. You might want to make your volume larger than necessary to compensate.

The process itself should be very similiar to the normal bake process:

• Create a GameObject.
• Parent all renderers to the GameObject.
• Add PerfectCullingVolume component at the root.
• Use the Renderer Selection Window to add the renderers.
• Create new Occlusion Bake Data object.
• Bake.
• Make it a prefab.

You can also take a look at the demo scene called "Demo_Prefabs".

 

Thanks for the reply!

Sorry I didn't notice the demo.
It was probably due to not adding the component to the prefab root.
I will try it as soon as possible!

 

Hello.

Apologies if the questions I ask are "stupid" or the kind that you've already answered dozens of times before - unfortunatelly, I'm in a bit of a pickle in respect to deadlines.

Here are the cases I have to deal with in the project I'm working on:

1. Doors (aka portals that can be opened/closed) (currently handling this case with Occlusion Portals in the native (?) Unity OC)
2. Additively loaded scenes (levels made out of multiple scenes, many areas visible from one to another seperate scene)
3. Main camera (it's an FPP game) attached to a prefab of player's avatar spawned to the map upon initialization of gameplay.

I think this should be all. My question is, will this tool work, especially given the conditions 2 & 3? (those aren't things I can feasibly change, point 1 is what I'd consider "a nice bonus if it works" - there are doors opening into caverns, even if somewhat dense with objects/architecture)

Would it be possible to handle a case of "take only objects with specific tags/on specific layers"? (I could always code in a tool to add one of the components presented in your how to use video on my own, of course, but I'd rather ask before I miss something important)

Once again, apologies for asking questions you had very likely answered in the past, and a bit of a rush from my end.
From what I've seen, this seems to be an impressive tool that would solve a lot of my current problems that make me lose my mind, however - this is a company purchase, and I'd rather know if the tool will be useful before I have my boss pull the trigger on the purchase.

Have a good day.

 

Hey,

1. Doors are fully dynamic objects and not currently supported. You'd add a PerfectCullingRendererTag to tell the asset to treat them as transparent basically turning them into occludees instead of occluders.
However I wouldn't expect that to be a show-stopper because you need sufficient head room anyway to properly support the situation where the door was left open by the player.

2. This is possible but I'm not yet satisfied with how it works. You'd need to add a PerfectCullingVolume to each individual scene and make it sufficiently large so it can include the occluders from other scenes. You'd then load all scenes and use the Bake All option.
If your scenes are very complex and large this might be problematic due to high memory usage and increase in bake time.

3. You just need to add a PerfectCullingCamera to your camera. It will automatically register/unregister itself with PerfectCullingVolumes that are already in the scene (or added/removed at a later point).

The most recent renderer selection tool allows to select the Layers you want to include. However you totally can write a custom tool to do this and add a feature to make it based on Tags (that is not currently an option). Generally it's just a matter of populating the bakeGroups field on the PerfectCullingVolume. All the C# code is included so you can see how it works and change and add as needed.

I hope this helps. I obviously can only answer your questions in a very generic way because each scene and game is so vastly different that it is hard to be more specific.

Thanks. Have a good day, too!

Edit: Added multi-scene and quick start guide documentation.

 

Thanks for your rapid reply.

Ad1.
It's ok. Just for the sake of future experiments/developments - Unity itself allows to define volumes that can function as a toggle. Of course, introducing binary variations would lead to potential increase in complexity of the search graph, but I think it's something potentially worth investigating in the future.

Ad2.
Out of sheer curiosity, what do you mean by "not satisfied yet with how it works"?
And memory shouldn't be a problem, unless Unity/OS has some panic measures I am not yet aware of, heh.

Ad3.
So, in other words - and just stating to make sure we understand each other - the camera doesn't have to be present in the collection of scenes during bake process, correct?

Thanks for clearing things up, providing the documentation and instructions!

Edit: Are multiple baking volumes allowed for better approximation of the playable area?

 

2. I just think the workflow is a bit clunky and I have plans to improve it.

3. Right. You don't need the camera at bake time at all.

I'd recommend to use a single volume and just use Exclude Volumes to exclude unplayable space.

 

Heya again. Im not sure if its really perfect culling related but i will post it in case someone will have this problem too.
I noticed that when i place Perfect Culling Volume in prefab so i can have same settings across all levels, my enter playmode time will increase about 6 seconds because of Prefabs.MergePrefabs . I was in middle of optimizations so i was thinking that maybe its problem in other prefabs but no, its this particular script.


It can be easily fixed if i just doesnt use it in prefab so i think its not a big deal

 

I believe this is caused by the array that holds all the Renderer references. Unfortunately the references are required and there is no good way to store them any other way. At the moment I do not have an idea how I could workaround the issue because it seems to come down to how Unity handles serialization of prefabs.

I will keep thinking about it though. Thanks for reporting!

 

Hi,
I used Perfect Culling a few months ago in a test project and it worked great. Now I'm trying to set it up in our main project,and it's not working -- the grid cells are compressed into all in a small area in the corner of the culling volume, see screenshot. Though it's also weird, when I move my view around the scene, the grid cells sorta float around within the culling volume like they're not anchored within it, but somehow....tied to the camera? Dunno, very odd.

I've got the Exclude Below Collider Array and Exclude Floating Sampling components added, but I don't see how those would cause this problem -- any ideas?

 

Thanks!
Well... I have some issues. I've contacted you through email. I'm embarassed to say I need guidance.

 

Are there any actual culling problems or are you just observing this in the Editor view? What version did you use before?

I'd imagine that the grid size just happens to be larger than in your previous project. The number of visible cells is limited based on the camera position because drawing too many gizmos unfortunately impacts the Editor performance noticeably. So this might be "by design" and becomes more and more observable when using more cells because they start to occupy a smaller and smaller area in the world space but the limit is always a constant number.

Search for
const int Radius = 6;
in PerfectCullingVolume.cs and you can adjust it. Just be careful because it can really impact Editor performance.

 

I'm testing the plugin on a M1 Mac, Unity 2021.3.6 Apple Silicon, and unfortunately it has project-breaking consequences. Luckily I always create a git branch when testing the unknown.

Once the bake starts, it gets stuck right after the scene materials are changed, freezing the whole editor. I could not see any dialog. Once I force close the editor and reopen the project, all shaders are broken, all scenes are completely magenta, even ones where I don't use Perfect Culling. Materials look magenta even in the Inspector preview.

Any chance this can be fixed? I want to move from 2020 LTS to 2021 LTS for Apple Silicon compatibility but this is a show stopper right now...

 

Sorry to hear this. Sounds like I need to buy a M1 Mac. I wouldn't think that Perfect Culling has the "power" to break all shaders and materials because all changes are local to the scene. So this is pretty odd. Any chance you could send me a log of the last Editor run via PM? Maybe that already helps to better understand the problem it is running into.

Maybe you can also let me know the very specific M1 model you are using. I'm not well versed when it comes to Apple products and I'm sure I'd be lucky enough to even buy the wrong one.

 

As an owner of an M1 mac studio I can help check if its related to m1 or to a unity bug.
Feel free to send me a test case. I also own perfect culling.

And as for buying an m1 get the mac mini if you want cheapest, 16 gb ram would be better for unity. rest basic model.

 

Sorry to reply just now, unfortunately I ditched the whole 2021 LTS test earlier today and continued working with 2020 LTS, I don't have logs right now. Maybe Lars-Steenhoff could help get logs to you quicker than me right now, but I can do it later this weekend probably.

I have a Mac Studio M1 Max, 32gb ram, but all M1 chips are basically the same just with different speeds, only exception being maybe the M1 Ultra which is literally two M1 Max chips merged together (but still, same identical architecture). The Mac Mini M1 is a great cheap machine for testing.

Imho the issue here is with the Apple Silicon version of Unity 2021 LTS. I haven't tested the Intel version of 2021 LTS, but the Intel version of 2020 LTS doesn't have any problem with Perfect Culling.

 

Hi, Patrick. I recently experienced some unexpected culling when using the tool. The attached file shows a simple scene with two objects, a sphere (for lighting culling) and an object (station board). Although there is nothing between the camera and the objects, the object is still culled when the camera is at a certain distance.

The board is culled somehow at this distance.

If I move this a bit closer, then the board shows again.

The sphere is attached with a renderer tag marked as transparent and double-sided, but this issue shows that the sphere is not transparent at a certain distance? Could you please help check this?

(If you do not see the board on launch, you might need to move the viewer into the sphere in the scene preview tab, and it will show up. I am not sure about the term for that, but like, hold the right mouse button and press WASD to move your view into the sphere without clicking the "play" button)

 

Hey,

Thank you for providing the example scene. Really appreciate it. Unfortunately it seems like it had some prefab and model references and that made it incomplete. Always best to stick to primitives such as cubes and spheres and unpack prefabs for providing scenes that reproduce issues.

However you mentioned a similiar (maybe the same issue) a while ago and I sent you a PM (private message). Did you gave that a try or is this happening even after applying the fix I sent? I will send you another PM so you see it more easily.

 

Hi,

Sorry for the missing prefab. I have sent you a PM with a more packed version. And the issue is happening after I applied your fix. Your fix was great under most of the circumstances!

 

I was wondering if Perfect Culling supports static spot lights and point lights? Is there some sort of option to add a light?

Maybe rendering those with their respective meshes, and then culling them when occluded by other objects?

I have a hallway in my game that has many little lights -- it would be great to be able to cull those lights when the player isn't looking into the hallway. Seems like it could work really well with perfect culling--is there a current way to do this effectively in the current version?

 

I was wondering if it could be useful to work with nanotech the nanite implementation in unity. If you can retrieve the point clouds of cluster, that would be a win.

 

Yes. You can assosciate any UnityBehaviour to a Renderer that is controlled by Perfect Culling and it will be enabled/disabled along with it. The component that allows you to do that is called PerfectCullingSceneGroup.

The demo called Demo_UnityBehaviours demonstrates this. It culls a Light and Script component.

Sounds like an interesting idea. Thank you!

 

hi Patrick! Thanks for this fantastic asset, I haven't used it too much yet, but I have high expectations based on reading this thread and documentation.

One issue/question though. I've noticed that in my case every bake of the occlusion data will trigger the reimport (actually twice, once before baking data and then once after baking the data) of all VFX graphs present in my project. It is slightly frustrating as it adds almost an hour to the baking process making it difficult to iterate with.

I am using HDRP with Unity 2021.3.4f1.

 

Hey,

Thank you!

Could you try to open PerfectCullingBakingBehaviour.cs and remove the line that reads:
UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.SaveAssets();

I'm wondering if that triggers the problem. Unfortunately I'm not sure whether that really is the problem and you are also the first person to report it. If this doesn't fix it maybe you can reproduce it in a smaller project and profile it so we can find the real cause?

 

Sadly commenting the

UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.SaveAssets();

line didn't solved the problem as I am now waiting with the Importing modal window once again. I think that the line is fired after the baking has been completed, but in my case, it happens (I mean the VFX reimport) twice - before and after baking takes place.

It will be tough for me to isolate this, unfortunately, because of the size of my project. Also I can imagine that this unnecessary trigger is caused by some 3rd party plugin - but it didn't happening anywhere else in my project until I imported PerfectCulling :|

 

Could you maybe make a dummy bake (cell size: (1, 1, 1), volume size: (1, 1, 1)) and use the Unity Profiler to profile the Unity Editor to see what is causing it? The asset does not really interact with assets in any other way so I do not currently have an idea what could trigger your problem.

If that is not possible I'd suggest to search your project for classes that inherit AssetPostprocessor and use the callbacks. Just log to see whether some of them are called more frequently than they should: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AssetPostprocessor.html

It can easily happen that you get into somewhat of a recursion where Asset A writes a change and Asset B reacts to that change and writes another change which triggers Asset A again, etc....

However Perfect Culling does not make use of AssetPostprocessor so it may indeed be a third-party asset that felt like it wants to join...

Anyway let us know what you find.

 

I'm on the latest version. I'm having a similar problem, but in my project it's reimporting all the fbx's after it finishes the bake. Which takes FOREVER. This is bad news.

 

I tried commenting out UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.SaveAssets(); and it didn't work.

 

I've run a bunch of bakes with and without that line commented out, and don't see a difference. Either way, it's a toss up whether it'll try to reimport all the FBX's or not. Seems totally random. If it does try to reimport, I have to crash Unity, restart the computer, and try again.

Oh and it's not at the end of the bake. It can be in the middle of it.

 

Are you also using Unity 2021? I almost feel like this is some Unity bug or at least change in behaviour.

If there is any chance of profiling the Editor while it is doing this it would be very helpful. Right now I do not have any idea what would be causing it and I have not seen any other reports about it.

 

I’m on 2020.3.4f1.
Only started having this problem after updating to the latest version of Perfect Culling. Immediately after. Before that, on the same version of Unity, I never had this problem. It has been happening consistently on multiple computers.

 

Yeah, I've noticed some fbx's reimport during the baking of the occlusion earlier, but in my case the vfx reimport take a lot more time so I focused on that. I am using 2021.3.4f1 if that's relevant.

I've tried to spin up the profiler (in a standalone process) but as soon as Unity started reimporting stuff the profiler froze. Unfortunately, the baking process failed, unity crashed eventually so I don't know if the profiler would show something interesting afterward. I'll try to redo it sometime soon.

 

Do you happen to know what Perfect Culling version you used before the update? This would allow me to diff the changes and look into it in more detail. It could help a lot in figuring out what really causes the problem.

Yeah I figured it might be pretty hard to profile it. Don't waste too much time on it if you cannot do it.

Anyway I'm wondering whether turning on the native renderer changes the issue or maybe fixes it completely? Are you both on Windows? If so you should be able to flip it on in the Perfect Culling Settings.

 

I was on 1.1.3.1 and now I'm on 1.2.1.

I'm on Windows 10.

 

Can you both open PerfectCullingBakerUnity.cs and remove the highlighted block of code (the red one; not the blue one - pretty much everything in the image)? This is something that is different in 1.2.1 (compared to code in 1.1.3.1). Just start another bake after making that change and see whether it makes a difference.

Reason being that I'm wondering whether Unity decides that it is a good time to recompile all shaders because lights and reflection probes were (temporarily) removed...

 

I'll give it a try.
Is recompiling shaders what's happening? For me it's reimporting FBX's. Can recompiling the shaders cause that?

 

Unrelated to the above reported issue, there was something I'm not clear on with Scene Groups. Apologies if this has been asked and answered, or if it's in the documentation. I haven't been able to find the exact answer.

How do I disable gameobjects that dont have mesh filters with the Scene Groups? When I try to insert particle effects into the Renderers array, they are accepted, but then don't work properly and I do get a warning that they dont have a mesh filter.

 

Unity may need to adjust the vertex layout. So it would be plausible. However all of this is a shot in the dark because I do not know what is causing it. The suggested code change is what I think could be causing the issue but I cannot verify it myself.

I'd say the Scene Group is the right approach. Check the Demo_UnityBehaviours demo scene. It culls a light. You should be able to use the same concept but swap the light for a particle system. It basically is listening for state changes coming from Perfect Culling and just allows to cull other objects along with it. You could also create a new Renderer that represents the bounding box of your particle system and is disabled at run-time and hook into that.

 

Recently I can't seem to finish a bake on my computer. (perfectculling 1.2.1, m1 max, macos 12.5, unity 2021.3.7f1)
It'll maybe bake for a minute or two, then just... stop doing anything. The little progress bar window stays up there with the ETA / avg speed.

It just hangs, activity monitor shows 0% cpu usage on unity--I have to force quit unity.

It almost always freezes on a Performing Readback stage.

I have no idea why or how to debug this. There is no errors or anything in the Editor.log.
Any ideas?

 

Are you using the Apple Silicion version? Can you try the Intel version instead? Furthermore if possible you could also try to downgrade to Unity 2020.

Anyway I recently pulled the trigger on an M1 so I can dig more into it myself. But it will take about 2-3 more weeks before it arrives. There is a couple of other people that reported the same issue and from all I have heard so far it sounds very likely that it might be a bug in the Unity Editor itself.

 

Yes, I'm using the silicon version. I'll check out on my intel macbook as well and report back. Thanks for diving in with us. I hope you enjoy your M1

 

I was able to finish a bake on my Intel macbook pro, same exact scene and setup, but it didn't hang. So it seems like it's a M1 silicon editor problem.

I haven't tried it on M1 using Rosetta yet (would need a huge reimport...), but my hunch is that setup would also work, since rosetta seems to be almost 1:1 with intel mac.

 

Hello,

There are a way to occludee dynamic objects? I have a small city with some cars an characters in my game, and I want that cars and characters be occludeed when there are behind of the buildings.

The plugin supports this case?

 

Hey,

Fully dynamic objects are not currently supported. It may be possible to use the baked information to infer visibility for dynamic objects but I'd still need to experiment with that much more and is not implemented.