Preview feature for stamper and spline carve destroy performance

[Vlastan]

Hi, i'm getting this problem in 2021.3 hdrp.

Whenever i activate the preview option for a big stamper or a long river with carve, the editor nearly freezes until i deactivate preview.

 

[designleviathan]

I can second this happening in URP 2021.

Any road, river, otherwise "carving spline" will tank editor performance if it's length seems to be greater then about the length of one to two terrain tile.

To compound this we don't have a 'clean' way to split splines and not lose big chunks / effort with the deletion of nodes.

If there isn't a way around the performance issue - could we please get a function or helper that splits the roads up splines up into smaller spline components into manageable chunks (while retaining their positions and arcs)?

Ideally this would divide / cut up the pre-baked road splines based on scene-terrain tiles boundaries.

Even in it's crudest form - this would allow us to draw road networks and have a workflow fix around the carve issue as we could then 'carve' in much smaller segments which are much better for the carve system itself imho and sceneview performance.

[designleviathan]

5 hours ago, designleviathan said:

I can second this happening in URP 2021.

Any road, river, otherwise "carving spline" will tank editor performance if it's length seems to be greater then about the length of one to two terrain tile.

To compound this we don't have a 'clean' way to split splines and not lose big chunks / effort with the deletion of nodes.

If there isn't a way around the performance issue - could we please get a function or helper that splits the roads up splines up into smaller spline components into manageable chunks (while retaining their positions and arcs)?

Ideally this would divide / cut up the pre-baked road splines based on scene-terrain tiles boundaries.

Even in it's crudest form - this would allow us to draw road networks and have a workflow fix around the carve issue as we could then 'carve' in much smaller segments which are much better for the carve system itself imho and sceneview performance.

Actually it's getting bad with any sort of complexity even if its within the realm of one terrain tile (and mine are all small)

[Bryan]

Thank you for this information, we will investigate this! 

 

[Peter]

@Vlastan When that happens, do you actually never see the preview, or is it visible? Do you see any error messages in the console? I'm asking because it is to be expected that the stamper and the carve preview take longer to process on larger areas since there is more terrain heightmap data that needs to be processed on the GPU, but normally once the result has been calculated, the result should be cached and the scene view should be fast again.

@designleviathan This is something we need to discuss with the GeNa team. I think your suggestion makes sense regardless of performance and could be useful for terrain streaming as well, so that the roads could be split and childed to the terrain tile so it can be loaded in and out together with the terrain. Additionally it might make sense to have some sort of a preview range so it does not always has to process a full road network if previewing a smaller part would be sufficient as well.

[designleviathan]

Adding that capability to Gena would push it upwards and help make it a must have tool for Unity level design imho.

Thank you for passing that on.

[Clyde]

@designleviathan, the roads/rivers do split at terrain boundaries and are childed to the terrain(s) if the Split Meshes at Terrains is on, which it is by default, when baking the road/river meshes.

I know that that does not help with carve preview performance.

[designleviathan]

@Clyde duly noted thank you

[Vlastan]

On 4/27/2022 at 2:12 AM, Peter said:

@Vlastan When that happens, do you actually never see the preview, or is it visible? Do you see any error messages in the console? I'm asking because it is to be expected that the stamper and the carve preview take longer to process on larger areas since there is more terrain heightmap data that needs to be processed on the GPU, but normally once the result has been calculated, the result should be cached and the scene view should be fast again.

I can see the preview, no error messages.

[Tikal]

I can also confirm, the visualizations are brutal on long splines. I specifically don't make long ones because of it.