About culling

[mightymarcus]

I have a simple question about culling of meshes to find out whats the best strategy to keep the performance high.

What is the better approach:

1. merge static meshes to a single terrain-mesh.

I guess the culling doesn't cull triangles but the whole mesh. So a part of the big terrain-mesh is always on screen, this means that the complete terrain-mesh will always be drawn, even if we see just a small part of the mesh, right? There isn't something like faces culling?

2. merge static meshes to multiple terrain-meshes. This way the amount of drawcalls is reduced too, but only the parts of the terrain are drawn that are on screen.

E.g. I split up the terrain into 4 - 8 single meshes.

I guess it's 2. Can someone enlighten me?

I make a game with a top down view, where the player can see just only a small part of the terrain at once, so I don't want the whole geometry to be drawn in every frame.

I am attaching terrain and decorations like trees and some other stuff to a single mesh and wonder if that's a overkill, if the mesh gets a high vertices count and will always be drawn completely.

Thanks.

 

[GameMonetize]

Hello

1. Correct: one big mesh will not be culled

2. You can still merge the big mesh but then subdivide it using submeshes: This way you reduce the dawcalls, use cache and keep the culling on

 

submeshes are used in this article for instance: https://www.eternalcoding.com/?p=283

[mightymarcus]

Great, thanks.