What is Culling?

Culling is a computer graphical process used to improve rendering performance by discarding unnecessary vertices or faces (polygons) based on visibility before they are processed further.

Beside improved rendering performance, culling may also be used to eliminate clipping issues between Shapes and Deformables.

Using Culling in Popul8

Cullmasks can be added to any Deformable by selecting the desired Deformable and clicking the “+” icon in the Cull Data section.

When a Cullmask is assigned to a Deformable under a Template, the culling information is automatically propagated to the fitted Deformable under Shapes, and is also applied to your Crowd Characters.

The Cull Data component includes two fields:

Mesh - where is necessary to assign the appropriate Template mesh.
Texture - drag and drop a previously imported cullmask texture.

Repeat this process for all meshes that require culling, then Apply Changes to save the configuration.

Visualizing Cullmasks in Popul8

To preview culling:

Drag and drop a Crowd or Character into the Outliner.
In the Mesh Visualization component, enable or disable meshes to see the applied cullmasks.

Limitation

Currently, culling is supported only for Crowds. If you drag and drop a model directly into the Outliner, cullmasks will not be applied.