Print

[COOLTYCHO]

Hi all,

After noticing our world's polycount is getting to unreasonable levels (8 million vertexes holy crap), i've decided to revisit the exciting realm of occlusion. I brushed up on the proper way to create an occlusion mesh via the HE Wiki, set the proper attributes in Maya, and noticed that the vertex count and draw calls stayed the same after introducing the updated assets into the world. In light of this, I assumed that maybe I had messed up somewhere in my attempts, so I figured I should try using one of the Occluders that came with the 'Clean-Engine' assets. Lo and behold, even the included Occluders (say that 10 times fast) didn't appear to be properly working.

Please correct me if i'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the barrel (a static mesh) should not be drawn by the renderer if the Occluder model (the selected plane) is working correctly.



 

[HE-SARRENE]

Good morning,
In your properties panel, can you set Under Visuals the Viewability to OCCLUDER_ONLY from WORLD_AND_ MAP for me please? Lets see how that works.

- Sarrene

[COOLTYCHO]

Hi Sarrene,

Thanks for the reply! I changed the property to OCCLUDER_ONLY and the results appear to be the same. I subjected my co-developer NoCake to the same experiment as well, thinking perhaps it was something with my client, but he had the same results. I also re-installed HE to no avail.



I'm kinda at a loss, perhaps its something with our world? Or maybe the included clean-engine Occluder asset is outdated?

Hmm, so I logged onto the Hero's Journey reference server and used the same Occluder asset and received the same results (or lack thereof).  Although, I did notice the Occluder is working for the names of characters, in the following screenshot you can see how one of the NPC's names is not being displayed due to the Occluder. Curious.

[nocake]

We have tried all the options. Can you please look into this. We can send you source files if you need.

We also found: http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/HeroEngine_Quartz

change: independent DLL’s for frustum culling and DPVS integration have been integrated directly into the client itself


Could this have anything to do with it? Does the wiki need to be updated with a new instruction?

[COOLTYCHO]

Hello again,

After another few days of experimentation, I return with the same results. I'm beginning to wonder if my past experience with Occluders in HE was just a fever dream, but I swear that occlusion was working correctly in the past.

Are any other HE developers having successful results with occlusion meshes?

[ToY-Krun]

are your assets defined as "occluder=true" in user defines in 3dsmax/maya?

If not, try that.

Judging from the scene statistics, occlusion models (set as occluders in 3dsmax) are indeed working, however, using a transparent mesh (which I think used to work for occlusion testing ?) does not.

On our world at least.

[nocake]

As stated before this isnt even working with the HE stock asset occluder models.

we have followed this: http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Occlusion_assets

This appears to be an issue in HE most likely related to the patch notes we referenced.

Does anyone have a working example in their world they can show us? If not please lets not cloud this post with suggestions.

Something is wrong in either the wiki or the HE patch until we see a working example.

[ToY-Krun]

Yes it does work on our end, however,
i will cloud no more  

Have a nice day!

[nocake]

Can you provide a working example? maybe even a source file for a test you have?

Its mighty odd that even the default assets and the ones we had working before no longer work and no matter what we try with new ones it still wont work.......

I dont mean to be rude I just think for the better of the community something should be done if the stock assets and the instructions on the wiki dont seem to yield any results or our variations.

If you have a working asset sharing it would be better for people to see the example since the stock one doesnt seem to work.

also we have a Discord up that is extremely powerful for suggestions while the forums should be left to quick solutions not drawn out forums posts of small suggestions.

https://discord.gg/0151gfyM2xwEIkUL1


/rant

[COOLTYCHO]

Thanks for the reply, ToY-Krun   

Here is a screenshot of the hierarchy and modified properties in Maya,



and the resulting asset when viewed in HE.



*Note, Visibility > Occluders is currently not enabled and when Viewability is set to 'Occluder_Only' under asset properties, the entire asset disappears.


[Edit] Just saw your reply, i'm going to download 3ds Max and give it a shot. Thanks!

[ToY-Krun]

*Officially*

It seems its "partly working".  "Before, it wasn't actually occluding even when it seemed to be, upon fixing that, it seems its the other way round now".  It's being looked into.

In testing it looks like existing models (for the most part) are occluding, where new ones may or may not.. so its an odd one, but is being looked at.

*Note, Visibility > Occluders is currently not enabled and when Viewability is set to 'Occluder_Only' under asset properties, the entire asset disappears.

Right, forgot about that, I use imported occluders and haven't tested with the "occluder_only" meshes in some time.

Yeah, your asset looks fine   Max would likely provide the same result.

[nocake]

So Officially means that the HE development team is looking into it and we should wait to hear from them?

[ToY-Krun]

Yes, the dev's are looking at it. 

[nocake]

From: https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,6269.msg35314.html#msg35314

   Broken Occluders: These are in fact not broken. Occluding culling works fine, in fact better than it had prior to the last update. The team put a lot of work into getting those updated. That last major update had a lot of hard work put into it. One of the major things of that update was the new and better occlusion culling. The only thing broken is the Blade side visual aspect to it. Yes, the visual representation for developers is not working at the moment. But that will be back in.
    The dvps panel and the stats/rendering information does work, and reflects everything from current draws, cached draws, current texture counts, cached texture counts, and so on. There is actually a lot of nice information that is available via the panels.

[nocake]

This thread is being discussed here at this current time: https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,6283.0.html

Some information pertaining to this post may also be in that post.
Updating for time stamp purpose for documentation in case anyone else stumbles upon these multiple threads.