Overview

Geometry instancing is an efficient technique for creating complex scenes with many repeated objects, while keeping memory usage low and performance optimized. By using instances, you can duplicate objects without increasing the scene’s memory footprint, allowing you to create large, detailed scenes for Sceneri without compromising on performance. This article will guide you through setting up geometry instancing in Blender and exporting it for use in Sceneri.

Why Use Geometry Instancing?

In traditional 3D scenes, duplicating objects increases the number of vertices and faces, leading to higher memory and processing demands. Geometry instancing, however, allows multiple instances of an object to share the same geometry data, resulting in:

• Reduced Memory Usage: Instances only require information about their position, rotation, and scale, not the full geometry data of each instance.
• Increased Performance: Fewer unique assets mean that rendering and loading times are optimized, making it ideal for large environments in Sceneri.
• Efficient Scene Management: With instancing, you can easily manage complex scenes, adding or removing instances as needed without affecting memory load.

Linking Geometry to Instance

Follow these steps to set up geometry instancing in Blender, prepare it for export, and use it in Sceneri.

• Add the Object to a New Collection:
  • Select your base object, then press M and choose New Collection. Name the collection (e.g., “Trees_Collection”).
• Enable Collection Instancing:
  • With the new collection selected in the Outliner, go to the Properties panel > Object Properties > Instancing.
  • Choose Collection to enable instancing for all objects within the collection.
• Place Instances:
  • Now, you can duplicate the collection throughout your scene by pressing Shift + A > Collection Instance > (select your collection).
  • Move, rotate, and scale these instances as needed to populate your scene. Each instance references the same original geometry, keeping memory usage low.

Conclusion

Geometry instancing is a powerful tool for creating optimized and visually rich environments in Sceneri. By setting up instancing in Blender and following a careful export process, you can populate large scenes with minimal performance impact. As you work on creating more complex scenes, instancing will allow you to achieve a high level of detail and realism while maintaining efficient memory and processing requirements, making it a key technique for game development in Sceneri.