Spawning 150,000 rocks in the UE4 Editor

TLDR(150000 = 50,000 x 3 cave demo rocks instanced in UE4)

In lue of finding out about the instanced mesh component i updated to 4.6.1. So to test I updated my scatter script to use instanced geometry and put in some extreme values trying to test / crash the editor. When I enter 50K instances for the 3 Mesh base scatter objects jump to 6 minutes to see the end result. It was interesting seeing the power of instances.

Anyone else experimented with instances yet?

great! can you share this!

Yes. Instances are powerful. I’m using them in GOLEM ECS. UE4 4.7 has significantly improved Foliage rendering performance with Hundreds of thousands of foliage instances that can be efficiently rendered and edited, with per-instance LOD support and per-pixel dithered LOD transitions. I hope this performance boost applies to instanced static meshes as well so I create some really nifty GOLEM Monsters.

Now that looks so cool! How many instances and what is you FPS?

That is really awesome! In your estimation, did you see any performance boost with instanced static meshes as well as the foliage rendering?

Thanks Hyeprloop. I pulled that info from the 4.7 thread. I have yet to give 4.7 a try, however, I’ve posed the question in the 4.7 thread, awaiting response.

Thanks Shoiko. There approx 1500 Instances @ ~22 FPS (older video card runs slow without any instances generated). Each Bone has its own instant mesh component. There can be several “Layers” represented by a instant mesh component. As this is the sole method of generating monsters in my FPS RPG Dungeon Crawl, I would be satisfied to get a maximum of 3 GOLEMS in view simultaneously at 24p. If 4.7 brings a boost in performance, I’m going for Titan GOLEMS comprised of 100,000s fragments.

If you take a close look at my maps, each forest tile actually has 37 individual tree meshes on it. In a map that has 5000 tiles, half of which are land, and all of which are forest, that comes out to about 100,000 trees per map, of which I generate 3. So 300,000 tree meshes including 15,000 map tiles. Performance is pretty bad with all that out, but it is nice that I can still click around and do stuff with that number of instances in play. At some point I will turn all my forests into individual meshes and be confident that I can have a few tens of thousand of them without much issue. :slight_smile:

That hex map looks pretty cool. Do you have heavy LOD on your meshes?

No, unfortunately I haven’t had the time or the need to figure out the LOD system. I think it works pretty good even before optimizations are made.