The scene optimizer helps you to get higher frame rates from your scenes.
Do you wish your game would perform better?
Faster frame rates mean that you can hit a wider audience and deliver a richer and more satisfying experience. However, scene optimization is a time consuming process, often akin to dark magic.
Scene optimizer was born out of professional VR and Mobile optimization work for our customers, and we have automated a range techniques to make it easier for you deliver better framerates with just a couple of clicks.
The performance boost you will get will be dependent how your scene was constructed, what your game play is, what your location is, and on what you ask Scene Optimizer to do.
The best improvements will be gained on scenes that have large numbers of game objects as is typically the case where you are using low poly or modular assets.
Scene Optimizer makes it easy and quick to iterate on optimization techniques until you find what works for your scene.
How does Scene Optimizer Work ?
Scene Optimizer takes a hybrid approach to optimization as one approach rarely fits all scenarios. You simply drop your object tree onto Scene Optimizer and tell it what combination of techniques you want it to do.
Scene Optimizer will execute your configuration and automate the optimization of your scene. It turns weeks of work into minutes, and encourages experimentation to see which approach works best for you, as we provide a frame comparison system to show its impact.
Intelligent Mesh Cutting & Combining
Scene Optimizer understands that they way you should treat rocks and grass is entirely different to the way that you would treat buildings and even mountains.
Scene Optimizer uses a combination of size, spatial partitioning and mesh combining to create intelligent objects that significantly reduce draw calls, shadow generation, and also aids the process of culling.
Scene Optimizer can also cut large meshes into smaller meshes, and change indexing to 32 bit if requested to make them perform better on mobile and VR devices.
This can result in massively increased performance as most modern mobile and desktop GPU’s will render one larger mesh much faster than lot of smaller ones.
Layer Based Distance Culling
Scene Optimizer can also automate the generation of meshes on different layers, and provides a system to easily control shadow and draw distances based on the size of the original objects.
This enables you to cull smaller objects quicker as they are less likely to be seen in the distance and to keep larger objects rendering further out. This can easily be tweaked, and can have a profound impact on render performance.
Occlusion Culling
Unity has an inbuilt occlusion culling system, which is awesome when used properly, but if used incorrectly, especially in open world situations, it can actually be much slower than no occlusion culling at all.
Scene Optimizer can help with Occlusion Culling, especially with large numbers of smaller objects such as grass and ground cover by turning potentially millions of culling decisions down into a relatively small number of larger culling decisions. This reduces CPU load, and can have a profound impact on your games performance.
Scene Optimizer Tips
Scene Optimizer should be considered as a handy helper to save time on some of your more common optimization processes.
Large open world scenes should enable layer based culling in the settings, and then tweak the results. You will typically get the best benefit by reducing drawcalls and shadows on small grass / rocks / bushes. Select your camera and experiment with the culling distances to tweak it. By reducing draw distances on small and medium sized objects you can improve your render significantly.
Occlusion culling is not recommended on flat open world scenes where there is nothing to occlude. It adds CPU overhead for no benefit. To get the best benefit, design your scene with natural or artificial obstacles. Stand behind them to see it in action.
Some vegetation shaders move vertices to simulate wind, and these will often break when merged. You can still use Scene Optimizer in your scene, but make sure that these these objects are excluded.
Bonus – Object Placement Tools
We added a tool to quickly align objects with the ground / slope of an underlying terrain – convenient when moving a selection of objects around on the terrain to a different spot.
