Hello, I’ve made two maps, In the first one, I created a massive building with only static meshes of building modular panels.
In the second map, I converted the static meshes into Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh Components stored in a blueprint actor.
Result :
First map : 50 draw calls
Second map: 500 draw calls
for the same amount of panels, at the same point of view.
I’m very confused now, can someone explain me why using HISM is not reducing the amount of draw calls like it should?
I am working on the same question, created s imple scene with 5000 actors and rendered them as single actors, instance static mesh and hierarchical instanced static mesh.
In my tests the single actor version gives the same FPS as the HSIM. the simple instanced mesh version gives only half the framerate.
I am confused as to what this means as well
there is this tool on the marketplace (Instance Tool in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace) and the author stated in the description that since 4.22 UE has an “auto instance feature” which would explain the equality of single objets and HSIMS. Maybe creating HSIMs manually is no longer necessary.
I would also appreciate if somebody with knowledge about this could add an answer
HISMC seems to have lost it. The draw calls seem to be the same or more than the basic static meshes. ISMC has a lower draw call but i cant get it to LOD. Was using 4.25.0 for testing.
Confirming it. UE 4.27.2 increases draw calls. Tried to built a small scene with and without HISM, and suddenly scene without HISM “eats” less than the same scene, but with HISM-actor.
Hello! I know I’m a bit late on this one but I came accross the same issue and found out that HISMs do not REALLY increase drawcalls.
In fact, if you look at the stats displayed by the command stat unit in the editor it will look like it, but it’s due to what UE actually counts in those calls.
The engine counts the editor UI in the drawcalls-count which adds a lot but should not make any difference between “classic static meshes” and HISMs.
However, putting the editor in “Game view” (see screenshot) will get rid of all the “editor-only” draws.
If you couple this option to the “Immersive mode”, you will get something much closer (if not identical) to what the real, in-game count would be.
By doing this for both approached (Static meshes VS HISMs), I could see that HISMs indeed decrease draw calls.
They probably have more “editor related” calls, which leads to this odd behavior while checking this in-editor.
Hope it’ll help people that might come accross this “issue”!
