Let’s talk about performance:
When we first demoed SculptrVR at CES 2016, a player could only sculpt for about 10 minutes before performance got so bad we had to turn off shadows. Now we’ve had artists put over 50 hours of work into a world without hitches. The only limit to world size that we know if is memory usage.
The first version of SculptrVR shared on Steam could barely handle 45 sphere placements per second. Back then, we could only let you sculpt every other frame! Now the engine can handle over 2,000 sphere placements per second, so we added high and very high detail spheres that place 4x and 16x as much detail per frame.
Here’s a timeline:
Dec. 2015 – First prototype: 100,000 voxel limit
April 3, 2016 – Launch: 300,000 voxel limit
May 27, 2016 – First LoDs: 1,800,000 voxel limit
June 21, 2016 – First Multiplayer Release!
Sept. 10, 2016 – Copy/Paste Brush
Nov. 21, 2016 – Second LoDs: 2,500,000 voxel limit (memory and CPU bound)
Dec. 21, 2016 – Memory optimization: 3,500,000 voxel limit (CPU bound)
Jan. 21, 2017 – Third LoDs: >50,000,000 voxel limit (Memory bound)
That’s a 150x increase in maximum world detail since launch! Sculpt away!
Massive LoD(Level of Detail) overhaul is mighty and great
The new LoD system dramatically reduces CPU and GPU overhead in large worlds.
- Reduced compute overhead
- Reduced frame drops during play and during LoD switching
- Many LoD settings: chunky, cubey, low, medium, high
- Always infinite draw distance
- LoDs now update even in multiplayer when another player is sculpting
The world below has over 10 million voxels and still runs at 90fps on a min-specs PC!
Chunky Detail (lowest)
Cubey Detail
Low Detail
Medium Detail
High Detail
Massive performance improvement is mighty and great
- Load times reduced by 4-6x
- All place/delete actions sped up by ~4x
- Voxel physics sped up by ~4x
- Mesh generation sped up by ~6x
- Memory usage down another 50%
- Added “Very High” detail brushes
- Low to Very High all run on a min spec machine!
Other Patch notes:
- Increased resolution of oriented paste
- Fix an occasional crash when rapidly paging through previews
- Preview pedestals now always show up! Unless they are empty..
- Added a physics thread to… do physics
- Exporting is now done asynchronously
- Multiplayer level transfers no longer have to bounce off a cloud server
- Peak memory usage during level load is reduced by 30%
- New multi-platform capable save system
- Fix bug that sometimes created tiny/giant laser pointers when swapping handedness
- Extended the floor out to infinity, but we’ll probably remove that next update
- Fixed ghost material that would sometimes appear
- Eliminated multiplayer latency when teleporting or rotating