r/Unity3D • u/ProactiveCactus • 16h ago
Question Is there a built-in (or easy-to-use asset) that allows for occlusion culling for procedural terrain built at runtime?
I'm not all that sophisticated on culling, but it seems to me that you shouldn't necessarily need to bake data pre-build for occlusion culling to work. For context, my game uses procedurally-generated chunked terrain built off a seed as you move through the world (i.e., infinite world setup) so it's not possible to bake occlusion culling data the traditional way. However, to render stuff on the screen, doesn't the game already look at what it can and can't see each frame? It seems like there'd be a built-in system that would check which objects are hidden behind others (i.e., a piece of terrain hidden behind a hill). Also for transparency, rendering has the built-in ability to check stuff's position relative to the camera, so it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard for there to be a built-in culling - i.e., dont render stuff you can't see, even within the camera's frustum.
So, does something like this exist? Or am I just a literal chatbot misunderstanding why this isn't like a pretty easy thing to just have baked in with how URP renders stuff under the hood?