Occluders

An occluder is an object that is used to cull objects' surfaces, bounds of which are not visible behind it.

Notice

Mesh Clutters cannot be culled by occluders.

Occluders can be highly effective in case of complex environments where there are many objects that occlude each other and are costly to render (they have a lot of polygons and/or heavy shaders). However, effective culling is possible only if objects are not too large. If objects are big and have a few surfaces, it is likely that an additional performance load of an occluder will not pay off.

NoticeIf the scene is filled with flat objects or a camera looks down on the scene from above (for example, in flight simulators), it is better not to use occluders at all or disable them.

Occluders are rendered by the CPU and stored in a separate buffer. Only the occluders that are displayed in the viewport are saved to the buffer. To display the buffer, you should pass 1 to the render_show_occluder console command:

Shell commands

render_show_occluder 1

The buffer will open in the upper left corner:

The simplified occluder that is stored in the buffer

Notice

The buffer is rendered in a low resolution.

Types of Occluders

There are three types of occluders:

Occluder is a simple cuboid shaped occluder.
Occluder Mesh is an occluder based on an arbitrary .mesh file.
Occluder Terrain is a cuboid shaped occluder based on a height map.

Last update: 2017-07-03

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