SimpleLOD user support thread

Hey. How soon - roughly - do you think that will be available?

 

Hi there,
Just been trying this out on a tree model. The LOD 0 only shows if i move the character ontop of the model. Else it seems the LOD sit on 1 , Also cant get the models be removed from culling. Seems like its not working correctly. The reason i state this is because i create several lod meshes of my tree and applied it to a LOD Group and it works perfectly. This brought my verts down to 40-60k, With your system it is sitting right up at 850k +. This is with 5 levels of lod incremented down on the sliders.

I have tried several if not playing with all settings and can't seem to figure out what is going on.

I am using the latest patched version of unity currently.

Any help would be great

Many Thanks

Daniel

 

@Glycin If you mail me your model I wil have a look

 

I answered your email about this same topic

 

hi really nice tool. easy to use!
what do you recommend to be used on trees? im thinking of throwing billboarding out and using your lod system.
i mean like what lod mode would be best etc.

 

@Orbcreation
When will you release 1.5f with LOD0 fixed for LODGroups?

 

@kilju A tree is not much more but a trunk and a bunch of quads. You can't decimate a quad any further and there is very little to save in the trunks as well. SimpleLOD will not give you any useful help when you decimate trees. I'd stick to billboarding or make smaller trees manually.

@daschatten I freed the entire next week in my agenda to make version 1.6. But I can't promise it will be ready at the end of the week although I will try.

 

Version 1.6 has been submitted to the assetstore for review. This usually takes about a week. After that you can download the new package.
There are some big improvements in the prevention of creating holes in decimated meshes. This would typically occur when you tried to decimate:
- flat shaded meshes
- meshes made with MeshMaterializer
- small meshes
When you used LODGroups, the hierarchy is now preserved.
There is also a slider that will boost the compression level. The full range used to be 0-3 and with this new slider it essentally becomes 0 - 30.
Full release notes can be found here http://orbcreation.com/orbcreation/docu.orb?1178

 

Awesome. Thanks for fixing the hole bug.

 

Hey, I just purchased this and am excited to make good use of it. What I want to accomplish at the moment is to take my character which I'll be instantiating other meshes (equipped items) onto, and after doing so merge all the meshes into one and use that.. so this is a task I must do at runtime while keeping the skinned mesh info intact. I've only just begun diving into making this work, but at the moment it is not merging the instantiated meshes with it, only the character body parts. But it also is breaking the animation, so he just reverts to his basic t pose and remains that way.

Clearly I'm doing something wrong.. haha. I am thinking maybe the avatar or animator component needs to be redirected, or maybe the issue is because I am retargeting animations via mecanim? I'll be taking a hard look at it tomorrow. Anyway, I was having trouble finding documentation on making this work at runtime so I thought I'd just post while I keep looking. I am currently using this command to merge the meshes after piling it all into the character:

transform.gameObject.CombineMeshes ();

Also, where is the combined mesh after it's created at runtime? Can't find it in my heirarchy... but it is disabling the original meshes it combines.
Thanks for the help
~CS

 

Ok, an update.. the meshes are getting combined into one and it is indeed working properly, and I am grabbing the proper animator component, but it's not animating. I can force the mesh to start working properly with the animations by changing any setting in the animator component while the game is running.. like changing the culling mode to something else other than what it's currently set to at the time... but until I do this it is just tpose all the time.

So I'm thinking the animator component needs to be initialized after the mesh combine, not before. Struggling on the how of making this work, but this is really not an issue with this asset so I'll take my plight elsewhere. Thanks for the great tool.

 

I'm seeing strange results when merging child meshes. For example, I have an asset with modular floor, wall, and ceiling pieces. I create a room with a floor that contains 3x3 floor pieces. I then want to merge those floor pieces into a single mesh so I have them as a child of an empty game object and then click Merge child meshes. This seems to work just fine. However, when I bake my lighting, there are visible seams and strange lighting on all the edges of where the modular pieces originally were. Is there some way to solve this?

 

Hi Orb,

Just an update on the bug I reported earlier where on an Android device, some skinned meshes became invisible. It turns out that switching off the toggle for GPU Skinning in the build settings prevents this in the latest version of Unity.

regards,

Raj

 

@CrisisSystem If the mesh responds properly when you manually move and rotate the bones, there is nothing wrong with your skinned mesh. Is your animation component attached to the correct GameObject? The hierarchy from the animation component down to the bones should be identical between the unmerged object and the merged version of your gameObject.

@magique There is a documentation page about this here http://orbcreation.com/orbcreation/docu.orb?1233

 

I figured it out. I can't remember now what it was but it was something dumb.

 

hi there, is there any way to export atlase as .TGA?

 

Hi, just got simple lod and it's very good. It did a great reduction and texture bake and lod setup for a G5 iclone figure imported and for some buildings but I tried it with the new G6 character which has blendshapes embedded and it crashed unity. They were all in fbx first . I'm on unity 5.3 and Simple lod is up to date.

 

Blendshapes were ok upto version 4.6, After that Unity crashed when you combined meshes of which one had blendshapes. So I made an update to ignore blendshapes entirely, since there was no API to get/change/set them. I am not aware of Unity crashing on blendshapes after that. But maybe since version 5.3 they've started to become a pain again. I don't know since I am still on 5.2 myself due to some serious bugs in the early 5.3 versions.

As of 5.3 there is a scripting API for blend shapes available, so it should now technically be possible to merge 2 meshes and preserve the blendshapes. I will make an update in the comping weeks to add this support.

 

Thanks for the quick update. I'll try using 5.1 to test.

 

Ok. Or use Mesh.ClearBlendshapes() get rid of the blendshapes before you merge or bake LOD's

 

Ok, got it working except with merge meshes.
I can create lods for each mesh seperatly so that's good. Also the remove hidden tris works good. This works in unity 5.1 & 5.3. It's just the merge mesh option that crashes the iclone6 figure but as they only have 4 parts it's no problem. Animation worked perfectly. I'll try the remove blendshapes instruction later . thanks GS

 

Is there no way to generate Atlas textures for meshes without first merging meshes? I have a scenario where I simply want to select some meshes and have the tool combine their textures into an atlas and then modify the meshes so they reference the new atlas. But this doesn't seem possible with the tool as it currently is.

EDIT: @Orbcreation, any response on this? I'm looking at other tool options right now because I can't do this with Simple LOD. I'm also not liking the fact that lightmapping is not possible after merging meshes. The chance that I won't need to re-bake lighting after merging meshes is pretty much zero.

 

@magique The whole baking atlases feature was added as an extra feature and has never been the core purpose of SimpleLOD or else I would have called it SimpleAtlas. The reason was that when you merge meshes together to save draw calls, you want to limit the number of materials as well. There are other tools that have more options to bake atlases. And of course there is always the Texture2D.PackTextures API function, which is used underneath most of these tools including SimpleLOD.

The reason you'd better not rebake after merging is that the lightmap becomes rather inefficient. There are ways around this. For instance, you could make sure the object uses it's own lightmap atlas. The lightmap coordinates can be edited as well. Please understand that these are not problems that are introduced by SimpleLOD, but are effects that are triggered by the combination of merging different meshes together inside Unity rather than with a 3D modeler and the way Unity handles lightmaps. All SimpleLOD can do is try to handle these problems as well as possible.

But I agree that it would be nice to have a better solution. Maybe have an option to generate uv2 coordinates upon merging. Or something like that.

 

Yes, because at this point the merge meshes feature is basically useless.

 

I had a question about SimpleLOD: Does it handle tiling texture UVs, or easily boolean-ed faces when optimizing a model? I'm looking for a tool that can handle something like 3 adjacent quads that visually tile (with a texture that goes from 0 to 1), and combine them into a single quad with UVs that go from 0 to 3. Something like this:



If SimpleLOD doesn't support this (either 1 or both steps shown), does anyone know of a script that does?

Thanks,
Luke Schneider
Radiangames/Revival Productions

 

SimpleLOD doesn't support this. In fact, UV coordinates make up a substantial part of the decimation process. So it will never (except with very high compression settings) merge the 4 quads in your 1st drawing.

 

On the delete hidden mesh option could there be any thought given to restricting the deletes to within a collider or some other in scene shape the user can define? One issue I'm always running into with decimating is poke through if I have a model with multiple layers(skin + clothing). Nuking the underlying meshes fixes this issue, but the current version will sometimes hit areas I don't want it to.

 

Alright, this is kind of what I'm going for:

On the left is the standard SimpleLOD hidden mesh remover while on the right it's bound by a box collider.

In this case I just created a RestrictSimpleLOD object with a box collider on it and pulled a reference to the collider from that.

Inside MeshExtensions I added the following 2 static methods:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.         private static bool PointInOABB (Vector3 point, BoxCollider box )
3.         {
4.             point = box.transform.InverseTransformPoint( point ) - box.center;
5.  
6.             float halfX = (box.size.x * 0.5f);
7.             float halfY = (box.size.y * 0.5f);
8.             float halfZ = (box.size.z * 0.5f);
9.             if( point.x < halfX && point.x > -halfX &&
10.                 point.y < halfY && point.y > -halfY &&
11.                 point.z < halfZ && point.z > -halfZ )
12.                 return true;
13.             else
14.                 return false;
15.         }
16.  
17.         private static bool PointsInBox (Vector3 v0, Vector3 v1, Vector3 v2, BoxCollider withinBox )
18.         {
19.             if (PointInOABB (v0, withinBox) && PointInOABB (v1, withinBox) && PointInOABB (v2, withinBox)) {
20.                 return true;
21.             }
22.  
23.             return false;
24.         }
25.  

And then adjusted your !IsTriangleHidden calls to first check PointsInBox to see if the 3 vectors are within that collider and react accordingly.

Ideally the BoxCollider would pass to CopyAndRemoveHiddenTriangles from the UI where you could drop the collider into a box there, but I'm new to Unity and would have to look up how to do UI's like that.

I like that I can mod and re-use the code. I'm bringing in Genesis 2 and 3 models and I'm nearly always going to need to nuke the shoulder and armpit areas and deal with other spots. I'm thinking I can make my own little UI to auto-setup colliders and pass to CopyAndRemove to deal with problem spots automatically.

 

Hi Orb. I know this is probably a long shot, but have you considered the option of simplifying meshes so that they are flat-sided useful in low poly games? I have many 3D realistic models and wanted to experiment with them to see what they would look like with flat-sides. Thanks a lot.

 

Hello,

I just got Simple LOD, and it seems it may not do what I was hoping it could -- let me know if I'm missing something ,but in my playing with it, I haven't been able to get it to work.

First, the parent object does not have a mesh renderer on it -- it's just the parent, and all the sub-meshes (which I do not want to combine) are under it. Selecting just the parent won't let me make LODs of the entire object. Instead, it looks like I have to select each of the child meshes, and then each one gets it's own set of LODs. The result isn't appealing, as there's just a LOT of objects now, rather than a single LOD with the entire set of sub-meshes and bone structure etc.

Second, I see the Blendshapes we have are still listed, sometimes, after Simple LOD does it thing, but they no longer have any effect.

--I'm basically looking for an alternative to Simplygon, since their Unity integration doesn't keep blend shapes around.

Does that all make sense? Thanks!

 

What you need to do first is merge the meshes of all the child objects together with the merge childmeshes option. There are lots of possibilities to choose which meshes should or shouldn't be included in the new mesh.
This new mesh will sit in the parent object and then you can make your LOD levels for it. Rather thane making LOD levels for every little child object separately.

SimpleLOD does not support Blendshapes either. This is because Unity didn't have an API to access the blendshapes. Since very recently they added this, but I haven't had the time yet to implement this new API and add blendshape support. i will though, but that is no use for you right now.

 

Hi @Orbcreation, just wanted to drop a line and say thanks for an amazing asset! Does as specified, and is going to save me many hours of toiling over mesh combining troubleshooting, so thanks a bunch!

I encountered an error with an imported model, where the model was turning into big squares. I found it was only some of my objects. Thinking back to all those fun issues I had in the past of nested models being different scales to their parent, I found the solution very quickly! Here is a demo should anyone else finds themselves in the same pickle I was in -

Here is a skeleton from the app store.


I found it strange to get a response from Simple LOD as follows:


and a result like this:


Having a look over here I spotted the issue:


I took the model into Blender, and just applied the transform when exporting the model. The result in Unity is perfect:


Sorry this post is so big! I hope it helps someone out there. Thanks again for a great product Orbcreation!

 

@hodgesstudios Very good! Using tiny objects and scaling them up inside the editor works indeed very poorly when you try to decimate the mesh.
And uhm... thanks for the kind words.

 

Having an issue. I have some background mountain assets 1045 verts, 1945 tris. When I create the LOD's they all remain with the same number of verts and tris.....

 

Hi,

It is not always the case but when you get to a low amount of verts and tris there comes a point where it can't reduce any further without making a mess of the mesh. I recently tested on a 47000 vert mesh and it worked fantastic and with the lowest LOD3 setting making a usable 16k one. probably could have gone down further. If it's set too low the mesh can start getting a bit messy although that's also down to the original mesh construction not just simpleLOD. As the test meshes get around your specified 1045/1945 I doubt you'll start seeing that much difference no matter what you use. If it is possible I also would appreciate some help to do it.

 

Not sure what you mean by " If it is possible I also would appreciate some help to do it."

 

Apologies. Me not being clear again.

Was meaning if it is possible to reduce from around 1045/1945 I also would like help because it would be useful for my main characters. I am not sure it is possible as from my tests when they get that low there isn't much reduction without the mesh getting messed up. Unless obviously something is ridiculousy subdivided which is probably something I would have done 12 months ago.

 

1045 is not a lot to make an LOD level of and you have to consider if it is worth the overhead of adding a script to switch between LOD levels. But the reason you can't decimate it any further is probably the scale. Reduce the scale of the model, decimate it and then increase the scale again. When SimpleLOD encounters a big triangle it assumes that any decimation it would do will have sever impact on the way the decimated model will look and therefor skips the triangle from the process.

 

Does SimpleLOD work with custom shaders for the atlas generation?
Will it detect non standard / common texture names?

 

I can't get the deactivate distance to work. Last LOD game object is still active beyond this distance set.

 

Can you explain what you mean by "- support models bigger than 64K vertices"?

Does this mean that this asset can merge meshes which Unity automatically split up while importing to perform decimation operations and then automatically split them up again?

 

Not sure if @Orbcreation is getting forum notifications. There were reports that a lot of that got severed when Unity made the forum switch a few weeks back.

So if you need an answer to a question, it might be best to send a note to his support email.

 

Wonderful asset, thank you!

One possible improvement: better feedback and handling of how light mapped objects are handled when merging meshes. If you've baked lights and then want to merge meshes, it won't let you merge meshes that use different light map textures. This makes sense, but it's not clear what's going on (ie why it was unable to merge so many meshes). Often we'd like to merge all and re-bake, it seems that this isn't supported. I'm be fine with turning off light mapping for the whole scene, merging, then re-baking, but it'd be nice if the merger notified you that this is an option

 

Sorry for the late reply people, I was on holiday. I do get the notifications.
@mcmorry the texture names it detects are fixed, but you can easily change them by changing this array:
private string[] textureKeys = new string[] {"_MainTex", "_SpecGlossMap", "_SpecMap", "_GlossMap", "_MetallicGlossMap", "_MetallicMap", "_BumpMap", "_NormalMap", "_ParallaxMap", "_OcclusionMap", "_EmissionMap", "_GlowMap", "_DetailMask", "_DetailMap", "_DetailAlbedoMap", "_DetailNormalMap", "_DetailBumpMap"};

@olavrv It deactivates the renderer component only, not the gameobject

@Xaiier Yes, when you merge the meshes in all the children of a gameobject, it is possible that the total nr of vertices is more than 64K. In that case SimpleLOD will split up the mesh. And frankly it does a better job at this than the build in Unity importer.

@Aranda I agree. I often receive questions about lightmapping. I makes sense to explain this a little better in the tool itself with a notification and maybe a link to a better documentation page.

 

Hi I bought Simple LOD. It does have some pretty great features. But when it came to creating the LOD's I don't seem to have any control over LOD 0's, reduction level, it just seems to be a fixed ratio of LOD 1's setting. The problem is the difference between Lod 0 and lod1 is hardly worth the creation of the lod 1. Why is the most important setting (LOD 0) not available?

Also if I use the LOD Group feature, it does create a LOD group, but it doesn't actually add them to the lod group renderer, I have to manually drag them in. No biggie, but if I am converting alot of objects it becomes tedious.

 

Hi

One suggestion in LodSwitcher, is to use the qualitysettings.lodbias parameter

 

I was wrong, I didn't realize that Simplymesh wasn't needed when creating lod levels. Just pressing lod levels will allow it to use the original mesh for the first lod.

However! I have a major big problem now. It seems simple lod doesn't support blendshapes! It simply removes them after the decimator runs. This is useless if you are using it to create facial animation or creating universal characters that can be changed on the fly using blendshapes.

 

A blendshape for facial expression is typically something you use on LOD0. LOD 1, 2 etc. only kick in when the model is further away and you will not be able to see a slightly raised eyebrow at 50 or 100 meters. Also, API access to blendshapes has only been added very recently by Unity. I have not yet had the time to implement this new API in SimpleLOD, but I will.

 

When trying to merge meshes I get,

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Argument is out of range.
Parameter name: index
at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.Int32].get_Item (Int32 index) [0x0000c] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/List.cs:633
at OrbCreationExtensions.GameObjectExtensions.MergeMeshInto (UnityEngine.Mesh fromMesh, UnityEngine.Transform[] fromBones, UnityEngine.Material[] fromMaterials, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 vertices, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 normals, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 uv1s, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 uv2s, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 uv3s, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 uv4s, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 colors32, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 boneWeights, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 bones, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 bindposes, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2 subMeshes, Boolean usesNegativeScale, Vector4 lightmapScaleOffset, UnityEngine.Transform fromTransform, UnityEngine.Transform topTransform, System.String submeshName, System.String[] skipSubmeshNames) [0x00563] in C:\Users\Eric\Winds Of Magic (Unity)\Assets\External\SimpleLOD\Extensions\GameObjectExtensions.cs:1257
at OrbCreationExtensions.GameObjectExtensions.CombineMeshes (UnityEngine.GameObject aGO, System.String[] skipSubmeshNames) [0x0059c] in C:\Users\Eric\Winds Of Magic (Unity)\Assets\External\SimpleLOD\Extensions\GameObjectExtensions.cs:471
at OrbCreationExtensions.GameObjectExtensions.CombineMeshes (UnityEngine.GameObject aGO) [0x00000] in C:\Users\Eric\Winds Of Magic (Unity)\Assets\External\SimpleLOD\Extensions\GameObjectExtensions.cs:317
at SimpleLOD_EditorPopup.MergeChildMeshesPerMaterial (UnityEngine.GameObject aGo) [0x0005c] in C:\Users\Eric\Winds Of Magic (Unity)\Assets\External\SimpleLOD\Editor\SimpleLOD_Editor.cs:530
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
SimpleLOD_EditorPopup:MergeChildMeshesPerMaterial(GameObject) (at Assets/External/SimpleLOD/Editor/SimpleLOD_Editor.cs:532)
SimpleLOD_EditorPopup:OnGUI() (at Assets/External/SimpleLOD/Editor/SimpleLOD_Editor.cs:262)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

Sadly this forum doesn't seem to accept the file, I will e-mail you a link. I did some initial debugging, and it seems that fromBoneWeights.Length > 0 but the model has no bones, so old2NewBoneIndex.Count = 0

 

I was wondering if this tool could be modified to offer mesh simplification based on error tolerances rather than using a target number of vertices. Sometimes you just want to clean up a high poly / regularly tesselated mesh but dont know what numbers to plug in before you would get noticeable visual differences. It would be nice if the test for visual difference was automated. Or does any other asset offer this?