Runtime Mesh Component

[Koderz]

@Z-enzyme;569862

This. This one currently with PMC takes the most of the time to generate a mesh. I don’t really need tangents there, just normals, is it possible to make a checkbox to skip the generation of one of the two in the Normal/Tangent Calculation helper? Just a hint…

Normal/Tangent calculation in the PMC is slow due to needing adjacency information for smooth normals. Currently the helper on the PMC does this by brute force search which means O(n^2) “efficiency.” I could definitely allow it to skip tangents, but the problem is the slow part is finding the adjacency. The only time you can get around that really is if you know each face is independent and doesn’t share vertices (think Minecraft where each face is 100% separate) then it can just walk the mesh calculating the surface normal of that triangle.

So I think the best option is to allow turning on/off smooth normals first, then possibly turn off tangents. The new one with the RMC should be quite a bit faster but I haven’t done tests with it in large meshes yet to really see how much of a difference.

@Chariots;569872

I’ve checked heightfield lighting system for terrain far shadows, DFAO, and heightfield GI. It is very easy to hook up to it provided you have the height information (and color info for GI, although I didn’t try GI in depth). All it needs is a bool and maybe 2 functions (can’t remember exactly) to get it working dynamically (it’s all in runtime folders without editor defines). Only issue is the scaling settings of distance fields is a bit finicky (put off that for later), but still it works.

Are you planning to adding specific geometry modes to the component (like terrain mode for heightfield collision, heightfield GI etc), or would you rather keep it generic? If former, would you be interested in some terrain specific contributions down the line? If latter, would you mind if I release the modifications I’ve made on a separate repository at some point?

Also, thanks for releasing this!

I’ve never really looked into the DFAO or HFGI so not really sure what it would take. If it’s practical to setup without hindering the performance in the general case then I’m not opposed to doing it, just not sure what it takes right now. I hadn’t thought about specific modes, but I had thought about trying to support heightfield collision.