Limitations of probuilder?

[orchid bone]

Is it possible to make a massive level with probuilder? Will there be problems? For example, probuilder meshes use mesh colliders. This can't be changed without a lot of manual work (replacing all mesh colliders with box colliders one by one). At what point will the abundance of mesh colliders everywhere become an issue for performance? Because I've heard that performance of mesh colliders is not that good. Especially if there are characters in the world colliding with the floors and such. Also keep in mind that there are also lots of curved surfaces too in a level, not just flat boxes. And those have mesh colliders too.

[sand plaza]

here is a pretty big level i made about the size of a terrain ,and made 90% by using probuilder, and performace wise it handles pretty well from just the mesh standpoint, use simple colliders where you can mesh colldiers where you cant and decide that when you make the model dont leave it till the end, generally is reccomended to make the more complex models in a modelling software cuz you have more tools for making LOD's and baking textures, but for more simple meshes like a trashcan or a pole, a road, a water body you can use probuilder just fine just try to keep stuff modular so it works better with occlusion culling and lightmapping and try to keep the number of materials per object low cuz it reduces draw calls, as long as you properly configure occlusion culling and LOD's you wont have much to worry about

to note that i have mesh colliders on just about everything because this is a shooter map and i need accurate mesh colliders for raycasts to project bullet holes

[simple swift]

Probuilder should be used for prototyping/grayblock phase.

[orchid bone]

there are popular games that have been made entirely with probuilder, like super hot, tacoma, tunic, etc. theres a list of them on the probuilder website.
so this is just wrong. there is nothing about probuilder that limits it to only the prototyping phase and im sure if an expert comes into this thread he will also agree.

[sand plaza]

all my screenshots are basicly proof for that

[simple swift]

I had to remove probuilder from our project because it creates unoptimized meshes.

[orchid bone]

interesting, could you make a post about it for the ask the experts event? maybe it has been fixed since. i'd like to find out

[sand plaza]

if the meshes are not highpoly there is no issue with using probuilder

[orchid bone]

arent probuilder meshes exactly how u create them? its like a modelling program so you decide how many triangles it has. so what do you mean by unoptimized

[sand plaza]

is hard to optimize the meshes like get rid of useless edgess and verts with probuilder since it has no decimate tool

and is hard to make LOD's in it to

[orchid bone]

none of these issues make probuilder unsuitable for finished games though, since i dont even see how useless edges and verts can happen, maybe if you're uncareful somehow, also many games dont need LODs at all

[orchid bone]

they are proof that probuilder be used for a finished game, right? or did u only prototype with them

[sand plaza]

i agree look at my pics almost everything is probuilder made, but if you make a very complex mesh is a lot harder with probuilder, since there is an issue with probuilder prefabs that causes editor hiccups when the mesh gets too complex, and useless verts and edges happen a lot to me

[sand plaza]

im aiming to finishing it, there is a demo out on steam

[cinder scarab]

Dropping in for a quick +1, yes in-game ProBuilder meshes are essentially the same as any other mesh. Zero real perf difference, especially if you use the "Strip All ProBuilder Scripts on Build" option. Build away! 😄

[orchid bone]

@cinder scarab by the way the question of this thread still hasnt been answered. if you read the original post then its about probuilder's mesh colliders.

probuilder meshes all have mesh colliders, what would the performance be like if there's this many mesh colliders? turning them into box colliders would take a LOT of tedious work. i know its better if the objects colliding with the mesh colliders are not mesh colliders themselves. but what do you think about the performance (for example in the context of a massive level, or a gta sized game with world streaming etc) of an entire probuilder level where everything has mesh colliders. what is the performance like? will it be a problem? Also keep in mind that there are also lots of curved surfaces too in a level, not just flat boxes. And those have mesh colliders too. and there's lots of characters colliding with the probuilder world that consists entirely of mesh colliders.

[cinder scarab]

Hey John! There is actually a setting in the PB preferences, for the default collider - you can set that to Box if you prefer 🙂

[orchid bone]

ooh wow! how does that work with meshes though? how thin is the box collider?
if its like 1 meter then that would mess with really thin walls where there's a separate mesh on either side. but if it's like 0.01 meters or something like that then that's really great! i hope really thin box colliders arent worse for performance than thick ones, any idea on that?

[cinder scarab]

It just does it's best to match the geo 🙂

Sorry I don't have any specifics on the performance, have to ask around elsewhere for that

[orchid bone]

apparently the box colliders feature is currently pretty bad.
if i create a mesh with it, it does make a box collider on it with 0.001 thickness (dont rigidbodies go through such thin surfaces, by the way?). now when i extrude another bit out of this mesh in any direction, it appears that it will still have that one box collider it initially had. you would expect it to now have 2 box colliders, so that it would match the mesh.
so this feature is currently unusable even in such a simple example scenario. are there any plans to improve this?