Unity terrain vs mesh performance. I’ll start with some of the obvious.

Unity terrain vs mesh performance. During the development the mobile game I currently am working on, I used this to reduce drawcalls by more than half in my testing scene. However, when it finally renders the mesh in-game, the mesh will still have the same complexity as before - just a bit less accurate. Oct 28, 2014 · To expand on triangle mesh collisions, and without direct knowledge of the source code, I would think Unity does collision detection against triangle mesh in the following way: a spatial data structure wraps the triangles. Dec 19, 2022 · Now, we are going to import the height map and the texture map into this terrain. This is clearly visible the larger the terrain gets. I was going to try and convert my Unity Terrain made with World Creator to mesh so I could use it for higher performance LOD so I bought Mesh Materializer. Most tips on here apply to all render pipelines though. This is also very expensive. Terrain colliders are optimized also, perform better then regular mesh colliders. With a mesh you have 1 texture that is spread over the entire terrain, so it will be much lower resolution when near the ground. The mesh is not eligible for dynamic batching An automatic Unity process which attempts to render multiple meshes as if they were a single mesh for optimized graphics performance. I already used the profiler to find out what the most performance hit is and it seems not the amount of vertices or grass, but the trees LODGroup has to do a lot of work, cutting my FPS in half. Nov 3, 2013 · Due to the lack of terrain engine API I am wondering how performance hungry multiple terrain detail meshes/textures are. Nov 18, 2023 · With the mesh generation techniques we’ve explored in Part 2 of “Building a High-Performance Voxel Engine in Unity,” we’re carving out the very landscape of our virtual world, one voxel at Jul 18, 2017 · Is there a difference in performance if I have a flat terrain, or if the terrain is sculpted high like a mountain for example? So for example if I am looking in a direction with no raised mountains and then I look at the mountains, will my FPS go down? I am speaking specifically terrain only, no modeled mesh mountains or anything. 6 make sure you check the Enable Instancing checkbox in the material. Unity Terrain Engine works in a very different way than Mesh. Thank you! Nov 23, 2023 · Hello, I am New and have a really bad problem I made an empty Terrain with textures with Gaia pro 2021, but when i built it for Android to test the game is so slow in mobile, for instance in Redmi Note 9. Likely a KD-tree, bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) or some other form of hierarchical structure. S. -can make any geometry, even flat areas less detailed, better performance. Having Unity terrain underneath the mesh and just “raising” the mesh is problematic, because now I have to have a huge heightmap resolution (2048), just to make it granular enough to stick up in the areas that I need. However, from what I can see, you will have an insanely large amount of these terrains. Note: if this is efficient then I would probably use other tilemaps for eg trees, buildings and other decor on the levels, so possibly double the number of tilemaps; a 3D terrain. Rather, Unity reduces the precision by which it stores mesh vertex data, which in turn saves space. The Universal Render Pipeline (URP) is a Scriptable Render Pipeline that is quick and easy to customize, and lets you create optimized graphics across a wide range of platforms. In order to import the height map, select the terrain settings, go to the Heightmap section and click on Import Raw. 1: Rendering “hand placed” Mesh Trees is about 10% faster than using Unity’s terrain engine to render trees. Evaluate, based on your goals for the game, whether the performance is acceptable with this chunk size, or if you need to break into smaller chunks. In Unity (2D) when modifying a sprite in realtime using the texture of the sprite renderer and doing SetPixel(), is that faster than removing triangles from a mesh of the same type? In the mesh approach I would have to change to given triangles and rebuild my mesh, but in the SetPixel for a sprite I just need to give the (x,y) coordinates. It is in quads (rectangles). As you might imagine, things slow down quite a bit if I have 25+ units moving around the terrain. Dec 16, 2022 · Q -) Do they reduce performance simply by existing or Colliding ? A -) No they don't reduce performance by just existing, The performance gets a hit when they are colliding. Q -) Do they directly impact FPS or do they slow down the in-game physics? A -) Essentially in a Mesh Collider. cons: -no LOD (but possible to make lower detail versions) -can’t blend textures! So this is my list. That would also be one of the the reasons why you can’t have caves or overhangs in Unity terrain. It especially delves into open world optimization in detail while being pretty concise considering the subject Get the Terrain Stitcher package from NatureManufacture and speed up your game development process. Aug 2, 2021 · The difference between using terrain vs mesh is terrain uses splat maps, so you can have very high resolution ground textures. The Built-in Render Pipeline is Unity’s default render pipeline. Feb 11, 2017 · I don't know about performance but I guess that if you import terrain from blender it'll be just a mesh without terrain's LOD system, you'll need to write it yourself, same thing with grass and detail meshes, you'll need to make your own LOD system for them. It’ll depend on your art style and how detailed your world is, but I find that about 100m is probably as big as you’ll want for an individual terrain mesh. What can i do on a Unity Terrain, that I cannot do on a simple mesh terrain. A mesh based terrain requires mesh collider, whereas terrain just uses heightmap data (I think). –holes. Unity terrains cannot support overhangs or caves because it is a 2d heightmap. It’s strange that the narrowphase is taking so long for such a small terrain. Jan 6, 2017 · Terrain in Unity isn’t great for performance. –caves. Apr 17, 2021 · Just conveying my personal findings. Separate objects for the buildings and trees. -normal mapping, parallax mapping, bump mapping, or any other materials / shaders. E. Should I make the entire tubular structure one mesh Jan 28, 2010 · I want to know the diference between them. Jan 8, 2024 · I’ve heard that occlusion culling may cost more performance than it saves when using terrain. Assume I have 10 different types of enemies and each enemy was created and animated in Blender (then the FBX was imported into Unity). At least this was my conclusion after my research for our large open-world game Eastshade. Is there a limit? Are these details combined and grouped in say…4’s? If a terrain data contains a detail mesh but does not include it in the terrain scene, does it still use memory? And lastly, could I get away with 32 detail types? I’d really appreciate it if somebody Jan 1, 2020 · I really like the pro combo because we can easily paint low poly terrains on the scene versus the more convoluted method of first creating a high poly terrain using Unity Terrain, exporting the object to blender, converting it into a low poly model, then re-importing it to Unity as a mesh. I assume your game is going to be more than just a terrain and a character controller, so it depends not only on your target hardware but also what other calculations are going on at the same time. If you need 3D terrain though you are stuck with meshes. y; But I want to find the actual distance along the y axis between my vehicle and the terrain mesh. Plus the built in LOD. mesh. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. (I know about foliage… trees and stuff) But what else? I really like the Unity Terrain feature… but I really need to use Bump Maps in my terrain… or it wont look as good as the rest of my game. Jun 17, 2020 · Also, just as a general rule, Unity will have less trouble loading a large terrain as opposed to an equally large mesh. Details. Jul 28, 2020 · The main advantage I’ve heard of Unity Terrain vs mesh based terrain is collision handling. Feb 21, 2014 · The unity terrain is more intensive than a mesh. The radius/shape varies over the length of the tubular structure. @larsbertram1: well, consider yourself asked . This “Terrain vs Mesh” thread is an awesome resource regarding very quantifiable performance improvements by using mesh terrains certain ways. You, necessarily, need 2^n + 1 height samples per TerrainData object, otherwise Unity will just assign a height of 0 to the unset parts. The more the triangles, The more the performance hit and So on. Even in the old Render Pipeline, you get much better performance when you manually See in Glossary data of the corresponding Terrain, rather than from a pre-defined shape or a Mesh The main graphics primitive of Unity. Mar 12, 2017 · Also playing with material render queue will give you good results if one mesh has always the same material. Like shadow caching. If you are sure that the desired result can be achieved using Terrain, Mesh to Terrain will be very useful for you. In some cases unity terrain will perform better than a regular mesh since it has some clever optimizations built in. For my purposes I need accurate physics on that shape. Then, select the height map you have export from L3DT. Jun 3, 2018 · Hi, I recently added grass meshes onto my terrain via “Paint Trees” and my performance went from ~150 fps to 30-35 fps. In some cases “my way” might be over-optimization for say a linear game that uses occlusion culling and such, but if you’re building an open world of any Jun 16, 2016 · It just seems like a super clunky workflow because it was hard to line up the terrain with the mesh (I didn’t found a better solution than eyballing it 0_o). I’m thinking of changing Terrain. I'm currently studying how to achieve the most believeable grass in Unity while maintaining a good performance on PC. See you next week… P. g during the culling, Terrain. I did go through the optimization guide without much luck, but unity terrain is so slow by comparison to mesh, that a default flat "terrain" with no textures and settings turned down still takes a huge chunk of performance. I studied the docs and found that what I probably need to use are raycast, raycasthit or Aug 10, 2017 · In terms of performance, you’re not going to find anything faster out there right now when using the same feature set. Jun 30, 2023 · A lot of years have passed and Unity has improved a lot, from render pipelines to lighting, even the ECS and DOTS systems have been added, the Unity team is working really good. Nov 27, 2013 · I am procedurally generating a tubular structure. Jan 22, 2017 · Yes, you can change a mesh at runtime. Voxel terrains are used in games like Minecraft, where the player gets to interact with the terrain itself by digging up and harvesting parts of Jan 11, 2022 · Hey all, I am making a tower defence game where I could potentially have 500+ enemies on the screen at one time. Microsplat shader is fast but if you add a bunch of features it will start getting costly. BuildPatchMesh is called over 1083 times and takes roughly 320ms, is there any trick I can do to decrease those figures? Or is it possible to somewhat distribute building the patches over a few frames? Thanks Sep 6, 2006 · I have a vehicle that is floating over a terrain mesh and I want to find it’s “altitude”. As the tube is constructed by connecting ring A of vertices with ring B of vertices with ring C of vertices etc, etc, I want to know what would be better performance-wise. Apr 16, 2020 · Terrain will be far better performance wise due to it being instanced. Mar 29, 2023 · If mesh terrains are easier for you to make, go with those. If you’re modeling a voxel-based terrain. I think they also do some work on the shader side of Jul 23, 2023 · Create additional 3D objects, or a some optimized mesh objects, for the slopes. An optimized mesh for the terrain. Apr 15, 2020 · Unless Unity’s terrain system performance has improved dramatically in the last year, meshes are actually far better for performance. I’m able to find it’s height in world coordinates with this: var Altitude = transform. I thought it was just going to end up with a basic mesh with a texture on it, but this Dec 6, 2015 · The reason this is a problem, is because I’m not sure what to do with the parts that are made up of grass. Placing a billboard grass texture through the built-in terrain detail functionality can already create some nice results and is probably the most performant however what's bothering me here is the wind animation. May 25, 2019 · Profile this sample in-game, on your target hardware, and measure how long it's taking to update/render from worst-case viewpoints. Whether that’s on a terrain or mesh will depend entirely on the use case. I’ll start with some of the obvious. I have overhangs and would rather not go the terrain collider route but will do a workaround if it is above and beyond more efficient. get the current mesh from your object using Mesh mesh = GetComponent<MeshFilter>(). It is important to set the Terrain Size to be the same as the L3DT map size (512×512). The terrain meshes are in the order of a few thousand quads (that don’t necessarily stitch at corners but are all aligned so there are no Dec 1, 2017 · Therefore all my veggies are regular GameObjects. This means I may have 50 birds on the screen (with flapping wings), 50 spiders (with moving legs), etc… with a total of 500+ enemies visible Get the Mesh to Terrain package from Infinity Code and speed up your game development process. Aug 24, 2023 · Thanks for verifying it’s static. Get the Terrain To Mesh package from Amazing Аssets and speed up your game development process. I opted to use regular meshes over the terrain system for three reasons: The first is that the default Unity terrain system is very poor on performance for the blobby mesh it gives you, and creates hundreds of extra draw calls and thousands of poorly distributed polygons I can’t afford to waste. I barely added any, it was only about 900 instances. I see terrain tutorials on youtube with lots of trees and grass, but I can’t see a way that would run on my machine? I’m not even talking about a May 19, 2018 · Hey everyone! Does anybody know about this? Compared to other colliders, does a mesh collider have a greater impact on performance even if it uses the same geometry? Or are there warnings about mesh collider performance only because people tend to use high resolution meshes for this? For example, if I use cubes and box colliders for collision with the environment, at each face of the Sep 24, 2024 · Triplaner shaders are are awesome for mesh terrains and can also stop the stretching. [Unity now has a dedicated Terrain development team that can add necessary features in the future, but if the main solution for terrain will be heightmap then it would prove difficult to have caves or holes in the terrain (I would appreciate any comments that address issues like caves, holes in Unity terrain, and if it's possible to do now)] I thought that I probably will encounter a performance issue with mesh terrain and I'll have to switch to a terrain somehow when a player approaches the surface So I did some quick research and it seems like in some cases meshes are faster than the terrain, mainly because Unity terrain produces much more draw calls than a mesh would. Sep 14, 2021 · This is HDRP focused, with a focus on HDRP specific optimizations. Using a root node for all “hand placed” trees and Unity’s simple “CombineChildren” with deleting original trees after Jan 8, 2020 · Hi, I have terrain mesh that has a simplified version I can use for collision detection. 5. - CPU: Drawcalls/batches, SRP batcher makes it so materials/setpass calls less expensive, but they’re still eating performance. When To Use Blender Mesh For Terrain. The shader will technically work on Meshes, but since it’s designed for Unity terrains, it won’t read the tangent data from the mesh, and there are no painting tools available to do mesh based workflows. Mar 7, 2018 · Hello all, I am using a fairly large map 10240x10240 along with World Streamer. May 14, 2022 · Possibly. It is a general-purpose render pipeline that has limited options for customization. So before buying please read basic information about how Unity Terrain Engine works, and whether the result you have in Mesh is achievable using Terrain. What it gave me at the end was not what I was expecting as seen below. Splitting it up into smaller pieces is in fact the way some people have tried to improve performance. Each grass prefab has LODs set up and are very optimized in terms of poly count (~5-10 polys each). mesh = mesh; Jun 30, 2019 · The Open World Terrain tool for Unity is finally available on the Unity Asset Store! Open World Terrain is a solution for creating large terrains and dynamically loading/unloading segments of the terrain and game objects at runtime as the player moves around the terrain. Dec 30, 2011 · Hi, I am using the Unity terrain and am hitting some massive performance hits when moving the camera around from high enough. Find this & other Terrain options on the Unity Asset Store. If any part of it is in view the entire thing is drawn… I use a plugin on the asset store called Terrain 4 mobile (T4m) that converts unity terrains to a mesh in Unity and lets you draw 4 textures on the mesh just like the unity terrain, and you can paint on objects like trees, rocks, etc Feb 8, 2020 · I think I'd prefer not to use the terrain system and instead just use a bunch of meshes, since all my grass/flowers are 3d models. . I believe mesh is the only way for phones. I’m curious because the forest has the best looking terrain I’ve seen in Unity so far and I still get good performance. The technique transforms all of the GameObject vertices on the CPU and groups Mar 14, 2016 · The mesh is not made smaller by removing vertices/whatnot. SetNeighbors will not connect the mesh, only account for different levels of detail done by Unity. So, if you use digger, or have caves, its already a regular mesh not a terrain. Do not spawn too many trees on Unity terrains; It is tempting to spawn lush dense forests in Unity, but the terrain renderer will have problems with this. Alternatively, if you want to replace the mesh with a completely new one, create one with Mesh mesh = new Mesh(); and assign it to your object with GetComponent<MeshFilter>(). However, you will probably need to use LODs, and activate/deactivate renderers depending on player position (for example, only keep a grid of the closest 9 terrain objects active at any time, with low-detail versions in the distance). Dec 15, 2021 · Use less terrain grass / details on Unity terrain; Each additional grass texture consumes memory, rendering and culling overhead. Sep 29, 2024 · At the moment I still use Unity’s Terrain trees and Terrain detail grass billboards as it has a much smaller memory impact than usual game objects. Right now I’m generating a terrain heightmap procedurally and building a mesh from that. If the object has a MeshCollider, it uses that procedural mesh for collision for that piece of terrain. I lose the terrain benefits anyway! The house is 1 single mesh and I was wondering if something like this would be a good thing to use a mesh collider for. The tool converts one or more standard Unity terrain into a set of custom terrain mesh and LOD meshes which are then loaded Feb 28, 2019 · So, if you’re looking for a great free/low cost terrain shader for Unity, I definitely recommend you check out MicroSplat, especially if you’re developing for mobile. I only hesitate because I heard they can cause issues with performance, and if I want to have many houses I would begin to worry about them all having mesh colliders. They basically take a small set of tile meshes and then instance those all over applying the height in the shader. May 27, 2019 · In general going forward (though exceptions will always crop up), the splats will be hand painted as they give much better results than in-unity painting. Dear Customers. Also since Unity 5. There are some tools that convert a Terrain to a mesh which greatly improves performance and makes occlusion culling more effective, although you’d lose the ability to modify the terrain in-game. position. Do the same with a terrain, and you’ll see the difference. There is an easy way for anybody to see for themselves: Put a mesh with one material in a scene, hit play an open up the stats window. I’ve seen some people paint these on using something like QuickBrush, so I tried hand placing them and it was even Nov 6, 2011 · Hi all, I’m making a pseudo-RTS game and I recently hit a big perf snag. Jun 8, 2017 · Can someone tell me what I’m missing with unity terrains? I’m trying to create a small scene with some grass and a few trees, but after painting the terrain and adding some grass it’s draw calls are over 4000 and the game plays like crap. Looked everywhere for a solution, but noone seems to be able to make it work Jul 17, 2009 · Dear Community, starting simple performance tests on my local computer I mentioned some performance differences concerning trees with Unity 2. 3-million is not a crazy amount for modern graphics cards (even 6 or 7 year old cards, I think). Have you ever tried to build a game using Unity’s terrain though? It is the worse experience ever, the tools are pretty nice, the landscapes you can create awesome, but when we talk about performance, expecially on Jul 24, 2023 · Create additional 3D objects, or a some optimized mesh objects, for the slopes. For large, static landscapes that we have to traverse through, terrain fits better. Does anyone know how this will effect performance, keeping in mind that Ill combine all my vegetation to one large mesh when Im done, so that it's not hundreds of gameobjects. Rendering out to 1km at your highest LOD won’t perform well unless your geometry is really simple. Jan 6, 2012 · pros: -modelable in 3ds max for example, more freedom. If you go through the officially supported method to generate a terrain, can you make a comparison of the narrowphase between generating the terrain as a mesh collider vs as a terrain collider? The model that contains the mesh must have its Mesh Compression value set to “Off”. By the way, the digger asset works by replacing the Unity terrain with a regular mesh. qhlui zang rdlnfor kvbyb lmssq mkavih fqi zzdozx ydvu ypgngf