Decal Grabber Plugin

Decal Grabber is a UnigineEditor plugin designed for automated optimization of the content at the large terrain distances. The plugin replaces the distant objects scattered across the terrain with a deferred orthographic decal that contains these objects baked into a texture. This enables to reduce the number of draw calls.

The Decal Grabber plugin splits the terrain into the specified number of tiles and then bakes each tile into a single texture. The number of the resulting textures corresponds to the number of the tiles.

To load the Decal Grabber plugin via UnigineEditor:

1. Run UnigineEditor.
2. On the Menu bar, click Plugins -> Manage.
3. In the Plugins window that opens, set the Decal Grabber plugin enabled.

   

   List of available plugins for UnigineEditor
4. Close the Plugins window.

When the plugin is loaded, the additional Decals tab will appear for the ObjectTerrain node in the Nodes panel:

To grab the decal, perform the following:

1. Select the terrain in the Nodes panel and go to the Decals tab.
2. Set the number of tiles per terrain side (the Tiles Per Side parameter) and the size of the resulting textures into which the tiles will be baked (the Tile Resolution parameter).
3. Set the height above the terrain, at which the decal will be grabbed (the Grab Distance parameter).
   Notice

   In isometric view, objects have the same size regardless of distance from the camera (they cannot appear closer or farther). However, the Grab Distance parameter is required as it affects LODs switching (performed by the engine) and the other visibility settings.

   The higher the distance, the fewer the number of objects and the fewer details of these objects will be visible on the grabbed decal.

4. Set up parameters of visibility of the decal to be generated.
5. Specify Padding and Anti-aliasing parameters to get smoother edges of the objects.
6. Specify a path relative to the data folder where the generated textures for deferred orthographic decals will be stored.
7. Press Grab.

In the result, the dummy node decal_lod will be added as the child node to the terrain. This dummy node will contain all the created decals. If you re-create decals, they will replace the existing ones in the nodes hierarchy.

The bounding box of each decal is calculated with respect to heights of the corresponding tile of the terrain.