Unigine::WorldOccluderTerrain Class

To provide increased performance, terrain occluders should be used wisely.

• A terrain occluder can be a great benefit in case of mountains or complex urban environments.
  • If a terrain is flat, occluder can reduce FPS since there are no surfaces that can be culled.
  • On the contrary, an occluder is highly effective if there are many objects that are costly to render (they have a lot of polygons and/or heavy shaders). However, these objects should not be too large since if any part of their surface is seen, it cannot be culled.
• When the camera is high above the ground (for example, for flight simulators), an occluder should be disabled. At the same time, when it is near or on the ground (during a takeoff or landing), occluders can be enabled to provide performance gain.
• If terrain relief is changed in the runtime, it is not recommended to use the occluder.

The terrain occluder is generated based on its downsized height map using cone-step mapping. Generation of an occluder texture is a time-consuming operation that should be done only once rather than each time on world load.

To set a texture for WorldOccluderTerrain in real-time, use the following steps:

1. Set a height map texture (in R8, R16 or RG8 format) via setHeightsImageName() . Cone-step mapping will be calculated and a new image (inRGB8 format) will be generated. It contains all data necessary to perform occlusion.
2. Get newly generated occluder image (RGB8) via getHeightsImage() .
3. Save this occluder image (RGB8) to disk with same name.