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Working With Volumes

For large or complex scenes, Volumes split the work up into manageable chunks. This reduces processing time, and divides the Issues List into more manageable chunks. If changes are being made in one particular area, a temporary volume to quickly check that section can be useful.

Here are some recommended workflow strategies using Volumes:

Set-up and Test

Examine the scene, and decide how to split it up. Then create a set of Volumes that encompass all the areas you would like to check. If you are familiar with Occlusion Areas, ZFighter Volumes will feel similar. Volumes define an area to focus calculations, similar to baking occlusion. The main difference is that ZFighter Process Scene only overwrites Issue Overlap within the Volumes and marks Issues outside the Volume as Outdated.

  1. On the Settings Page, navigate to the Volumes section at the bottom. Click Add Volume. This creates an empty cubic Volume in your hierarchy, and a transparent blue box in your Scene view. Drag the transform handle to move the entire Volume, or grab the edge handles to resize, similar to a Box Collider or Occlusion Area in Unity. It may be helpful to use Orthographic (Iso) setting of the Scene Gizmo while placing and resizing Volumes.
  2. Volumes will calculate any triangle that has bounds intersecting a Volume. To make sure all possible issues are covered, it is recommended to set up Volumes to slightly overlap.
  3. Organize and rename Volume GameObjects in the hierarchy as needed.
  4. Multi-select the GameObjects in the hierarchy to view and edit multiple Volumes at the same time.
  5. With the ZFighter window active on the Settings tab, you can see and toggle which Volumes are active. Click the Process Scene button to calculate Issues within the active Volumes. To process the entire Scene, uncheck Process Only Volumes.
  6. Run some test Process Scene operations with different active Volumes to ensure the results are as expected. Then it may be useful to use the Clear Issues button to remove any garbage data generated from test operations before beginning work on the Issues List. See Cleaning Up for more details.

Workflow Flexibility

Volumes can be created or deleted at any time, as they do not store data. Instead, Volumes tell ZFighter which areas to calculate in a given Process Scene operation. Any Issues that were found previously will be preserved, but if the Issue is outside the selected Volumes, the data wll be marked as Outdated and hidden from the Issues List by default. If Volume GameObjects change, or information in the Settings tab is changed, nothing will be affected until a new Process Scene operation is completed.

Update Often

It is recommended to use Re-Check and Process Scene frequently. No data is lost by this, only updated. By default, outdated Issues are hidden in the Issues List. Use the Show/Hide Properties Section to change which Issues are displayed in the Issues List. This will easily allow the Issues List to display only the most relevant Issues at a time.

Example Uses

Workflow example 1: Divide and Conquer with Volumes.

After creating a large scene including an exterior landscape and house interior, a user wants to verify and fix any potential issues along the player's path. The scene is large, so processing may take a long time and create a very long Issues List. So to split the work into manageable sections, the user creates a series of Volumes along the player path, and tests the outside section, fixes Issues, then the house interior bottom floor, then the house interior upper floor, etc. Background objects are not ever even included in any Volumes as they are too far away for z-fighting to be seen. After all Issues are addressed, the user turns off the Process Only Volumes setting and processes the entire scene to see if anything else drastic was missed. All the previous Issues that were Dismissed or edited will retain that status, providing reassurance that the scene is done.

Workflow example 2: Spot-Check using Volumes

After a user has completed a scene, they need to edit a single room and add some furniture and move some walls. They then create a small Volume that contains only that room to verify that they did not create any additional Issues in the process. They may then need to edit another room. Instead of making a new Volume, they just drag the spot-check Volume to the new work area in the Scene view.