Add InstancedMesh2 Culling behavior for shadow casting

[johnnyrainbow]

Hey, I love the instancedMesh2 implementation, its fantastic.

However i'd very much like the option to add a culling behaviour that works similar to CullingDynamic, however only culls objects that are both offscreen AND not casting a shadow on screen. (example, a tree outside the frustrum, casting a shadow on a plane. The visible within frustrum shadow disappears when the out of frustrum object is culled. I'd like to prevent culling if the shadow is in frustrum.

Would this be possible?

[agargaro]

Hi, thanks :)

With the current version it is not possible.

I don't want to go into too much technical detail, but the current implementation has limitations due to the matrices swaps within InstanceMatrix, so these days, I am writing a new version that allows to swap indexes instead of all data (better performance and it will also be possible to sort).

So I'm going to fix this shadow problem directly in the new version, in the next days.

If you want to follow library updates, this is the new repo link (on npm it will remain the same): https://github.com/three-ez/instanced-mesh

[johnnyrainbow]

Amazing, I can't wait to try the new version! Can you please post here when its ready, and i'll try it :)

[agargaro]

@johnnyrainbow

Everything is ready for the first release 🎉 I just need to write the README.

Would you like to come to the three.ez discord server, so I can let you try it before I publish it?

[agargaro]

In this example you can see fixed shadow :)

https://stackblitz.com/edit/three-ez-instancedmesh2-cullingstatic-1kk-forest?file=src%2Fmain.ts

[johnnyrainbow]

@agargaro Legend!! I'll update and test it out first thing tomorrow 😁

[agargaro]

The package on npm is called @three.ez/instanced-mesh-test (it is being tested).
The constructor parameters have changed a bit.
Maybe let me know when you test it so I can help you :)