Principle of work of HLOD

[JohnnyDrive1]

Hi, again! I have question about principle of work of HLOD For the purpose of testing I placed 10k prefabs of soldier model (static, no skinning). And then I tried to make HLOD. I waited for 2 hours! And in the end I have something like this

I am thinking, my computer is still thinking and new soldiers will appear soon. But I watched the structure of HLOD.. and I did not found combined mesh. I thought that at HLOD object I will find some meshes which will be combined version of 10-20 soldiers. What have I missed in the understanding of HLOD?

[JohnnyDrive1]

Oh! I am sorry. I double-clicked at "Mesh" field of "Mesh Filter" and found combined meshes! Cool!

But it is very strange, that when I am selecting object in Scene hierarchy, only one object is highlighted at the Scene

[amirebrahimi]

For the purpose of testing I placed 10k prefabs of soldier model (static, no skinning). And then I tried to make HLOD. I waited for 2 hours!

Yikes! I wish you had started with a smaller test case. 2 hours is a long time to wait. It's possible that you've encountered a bug. I'm going to see if I can repro with a smaller case.

[amirebrahimi]

I've made a video here, which I think should help: https://youtu.be/EuBeZvzVwrw

I also fixed a few small issues when deleting objects: e1c9cc5

Update your code and try the latest and let me know if this fixes your issue.

[JohnnyDrive1]

Hi, dear amirebrahimi! Thank you! I will watch this video soon and I will give you feedback!

[JohnnyDrive1]

Hi, dear amirebrahimi! Finally I tested new version of AutoLOD! Great thanks for your help!

I started brand new project from scratch and imported AutoLOD according to guide (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD/issues/63#issuecomment-577613531) - everything was OK! No setup bugs!

I watched your video - it is cool and I understood main idea! I repeated everything that you made with one exception - I generated 30x30 spheres, not 10x10. And I have strange results: My fps for an array of spheres without HLOD is higher than for array of spheres with HLOD (see attached screenshots below) For performance test I created 30x30 spheres with unique materials with your Grid Placemenet Utility.

Did I misunderstand something? I wanted to use HLOD for better performance of my scene.

ps. Sorry for delay with answer! But, man, I kept my word and check all of your improvements!:)

pps. During my work I encountered freeze of application after saving of scene like I described at thread (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD/issues/64) I will give you more info there

[JohnnyDrive1]

No HLOD

[JohnnyDrive1]

With HLOD

Pay attention at FPS - it is higher, when no HLOD is used ps. This screens were made with run-time mode, not editor mode

[amirebrahimi]

Apologies for not commenting on this immediately, so you know I've seen it. Per usual, I only get to work on this project on my own time, so that only comes so often. I had to handle some updates to the default mesh simplifier, which took most of my time tonight, but I hope to take a look at this soon.

[JohnnyDrive1]

Apologies for not commenting on this immediately, so you know I've seen it. Per usual, I only get to work on this project on my own time, so that only comes so often. I had to handle some updates to the default mesh simplifier, which took most of my time tonight, but I hope to take a look at this soon.

Thank you! Everything is OK about time. We all have a lot of work

[amirebrahimi]

Hi @AzatKhafizov - I've come back to this and tried to reproduce your issue. I created a 30x30 grid of sphere prefabs and here is what I see in play mode with HLOD disabled:

with HLOD enabled:

There's a minor difference in performance with HLOD enabled being better than disabled, but as you'll see the batch count is low compared to without. One thing that is peculiar in your setup is that you have a much higher batch count than what I have for both. I wonder if you have duplicates of objects.

I fixed your other issue (#64) and there is now package manager support, so if you are still interested in resolving this issue, then please try out the update. We could also set up a zoom some time if we can't manage to resolve this over github.

[amirebrahimi]

If you're no longer using AutoLOD or need to resolve this issue, then please close the issue.

[JohnnyDrive1]

Dear amirebrahimi, thank you for your help! I will check it as soon as I get free time!

[ralkan]

@amirebrahimi @AzatKhafizov I'm not sure if your issue was resolved but I tried exactly the same setups. Once with a new URP project (disabling batching in project settings) and once with Built-in RP (also disabling batching).

On the URP version the batches increased with HLOD for some reason, but the built-in without HLOD I got around 3150 batches, and with HLOD enabled I got 12 batches which is AWESOME!

I'm going to investigate why the URP setup did get more batches and decreased FPS. With this I hope to have at least given a push in the right direction for you both.

Kind Regards

[ralkan]

In the URP project I noticed that the component LOD Groups and Mesh Renderer is not being disabled when HLOD is activated. I believe that's the reason that the batches count increases and also HLOD does not work as expected.

[JohnnyDrive1]

@ralkan thank you for the info! ps. Two years ago I gave up with direct solving of this task after several tries and just used smaller amount of objects. It is good that you could solved the problem with built-in RP! Unfortunately, I can not test this in the nearest time and can not interactively help you with this theme, but thread is open for commenting - maybe someone will help

[amirebrahimi]

@ralkan - This project hasn't had active development for some time, so unfortunately URP is not supported.