Paid Plugins + Scripts Scene Performance

ScenePerformance - make scenes with many characters playable

Ever built a scene with six or eight characters in a nice big environment and ended up at 20 FPS, even though you were looking at just one of them? That is how VaM works: every character costs almost her full price whether you can see her or not. Hair, clothing, skin, colliders - all of it keeps running behind walls, on other floors and behind your back. The same goes for lights: a shadow-casting lamp in a room you are not in still redraws its surroundings every frame.

ScenePerformance is a plugin that stops paying for what you cannot see.

IMPORTANT - what you need

The plugin requires the CPU Performance Patch:
https://hub.virtamate.com/resources...to-30-faster-physics-up-to-60-more-fps.43427/

Without it the plugin will not load. Install the patch first, then add the plugin.

How it works

Characters you cannot see are paused. A character who is outside your view, or inside it but hidden behind a wall or a floor, keeps her pose, her plugins and her animation, but everything nobody can see stops: hair and clothing simulation, the hair and skin rebuild, her colliders, her rendering. The moment she is about to come into view she is switched back on, in stages, so nothing pops or jumps. The margin around your view widens by itself while you turn or walk, so she is back before you see her.

Far characters lose their simulation. Beyond a distance you choose, cloth and hair simulation is switched off and comes back when you walk up. There is also an option to keep far hair simulating on a light budget, so it never snaps back to its styled shape.

Lights you cannot see are paused too. A light is kept on only when something it lights is actually on screen. Lamps in other rooms, behind walls or on another floor are switched off and come back as you walk in. On top of that you can limit how many lights cast shadows at once and make Force Pixel lights respect VaM's Pixel Light Count.

Nothing is switched off as an atom and nothing is written into your scene. Everything is put back before a scene save, when you turn an option off and when you remove the plugin.

How to use it

Add ScenePerformance.dll to any atom, once per scene. Scene Plugins is the natural place. That is it - pausing hidden characters and lights is on by default.

The panel is split into groups: characters, simulation, lights and display. Every option has a tooltip that explains what it does, shown under the plugin window when you hover over it.

Two things worth knowing:

All Optimization Off - the first switch in the panel. It turns everything off at once and puts the scene back exactly as it was, so you can compare with and without in one click.

Show FPS Counter - an FPS and frame time readout in the corner of the screen, with an option to also show how many characters and lights are live right now.

What to expect

In my office test scene with 7 characters and one of them in view, the frame went from 47.8 ms to 16.5 ms - from 21 to 61 FPS - without the light optimization yet in place. In a two-storey house with 8 characters and 21 shadow-casting lights, one spot went from 18 to 92 FPS.

Your numbers will depend on the scene. The more characters and lights are hidden from where you stand, the more you gain.

Limitations

The plugin only saves what you cannot see. A character who is on screen costs what she costs, so ten characters lying on top of each other in front of the camera will run exactly as before - there is nothing to optimize.

Walls only hide characters and lights if the environment has colliders, and Collision has to be switched on for the environment atom. Without it the plugin still pauses whatever is outside your view, but not what is behind a wall.

It is built and tested for desktop. It runs in VR, but the margins are not tuned for fast head turns yet, and the FPS counter is not visible inside the headset.

As always, feedback and bug reports are hugely appreciated. If a character or a light disappears when it should not, tell me where you stood and what you looked at.