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Questions
Compatibility with Dynamic Loading Kit, and other questions
I currently utilize Kyle Gillen's Dynamic Loading Kit asset to manage the loading and unloading of Terrain 'chunks' in my scene: My source Terrain is a 32 x 32 km behemoth (Game is a flight sim) that the kit splits up into 256 2 x 2 km prefabs, and then manages the loading and unloading of these prefabs for me at runtime. My trees are currently placed as terrain trees on the source terrain, and thus get split up along with the terrain itself (I place them via script, I ain't painting 1024 square km of trees by hand, there are almost 3 million of them :D ). But they look kind of atrocious - Popping from billboard to mesh at very close distances due to how many there are, and also popping into existence 5 km away (The furthest I can set my terrain instances to draw them at before my computer starts begging for mercy). So I'm looking for an optimization solution and LushLOD has me intrigued. A few questions:
1) If I switch over from terrain trees to LushLOD, can the LushLODTreesManager be adapted to work with dynamically loaded / unloaded terrain pieces? Reading the documentation here it sounds like the LushLODTreesManager may expect to be the only instance of itself in a scene. How would I / could I set it up to manage LushLOD trees that would presumably be loaded in alongside the terrain chunks (Gillen's DLM asset doesn't just load terrain, it can load objects that get populated on that terrain too)? If you require more info about the kit to answer this question I can probably provide it.
2) Can the LushLOD handle mega-extreme distances? As mentioned I'm currently drawing trees several km away (Probably 50k - 70k of them with maybe 25k in view at a time) and would like trees to be visible even further than that - Maybe twice as far. Any ballparks on potential performance improvements over similarly set up terrain trees?
3) Kind of an add-on to question #2, can LushLOD support additional LOD groups for those extreme distances? Say an LOD that billboards not a single tree but an entire parent group of trees?
Thanks!
Customer support service by UserEcho
If the computer is begging for mercy on terrain trees, it will be crashing on LushLOD trees. LushLOD trees do look quite a bit better than terrain trees. But that better looking comes at a cost, they are significantly more expensive to render than terrain trees. I don't think it'll work. Perhaps if you could somehow custom edit the LushLOD trees to make them faster... I do include the full source. One way to make them faster would be if you could batch together an entire terrain chunk worth of the trees into a single billboard, to reduce the extreme distance trees down to a single billboard. But that would be very complicated to do. But out of the box, LushLOD trees aren't going to be fast enough for what you are needing.