OCCLUSION Planes & MULTI-Bounds

[BadPenney]

I've recently become aware of Topic Title's GECK tools. I must admit ignorance of their existence previously and I am very interested to see any more information about them.

 

Occlusion Planes apparenlty are invisible to the eye while playing in the game, but can be placed in landscapes in the GECK as a barrier preventing the rendering of objects blocked by them from the line of sight of the player. At least that is what I underatand at this point. It seems that a wall made from a train car may block the player from viewing objects rendered behind it, but it will not prevent those objects from actually rendering. That means an improvement in performance and FPS for my mod if I block what you can't see from rendering anyway.

 

hikky71 made me aware of these tools. I hope he won't mind if I quote him for starters:

(An occlusion plane) affects Actors (like NPCs) and Landscape as well as objects bound by a MultiBound.

They can be a bit "tricky" to use, sometimes you don't get the result you expect with visual artefacts as a result. Apart from this (http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/Occlusion_Culling) article, there aren't alot of info available on how to use them.

 

MultiBounds group static objects into a single visibility check, which can be useful when a lot of items are gathered in a small area. When the view is completely obstructed behind a Occlusion Plane, they are removed from the rendering queue completely.

 

You can view them in GECK by selecting View -> Show/Hide Window. If you turn off everything except Multibounds and Occlusion Planes you will get a clear view.

 

He was kind enough to create an .esp plugin to augment my Return to Shady Sands mod. I haven't had time to check it out yet, but I'm excited by this development. There are many quirky consequences to having a small area with many rendered objects that may well be improved with the addition of these tools. I hope to integrate them into a new version of the mod at some point.

 

In the meantime, I wanted to present these topics in case other people are interested or have more information to share about these or other useful but lesser known tools and methods.

[Ez0n3]

This article helped me understand them a little better: Occlusion Culling (especially the "debugging" stuff at the bottom)

 

One thing I still don't get, each object has a tab for a multibound - but I've left that blank and it still worked. So long as the object I want to cull resides within the multibound, setting that in the tab doesn't seem necessary. I'm wondering if it's for objects outside the multibound and by setting the multibound in the tab might be a way of telling the engine - Ok, I know this object isn't in there, but I want you to treat it as if it were.