The visual quality and performance of your tiled mesh display depends on several factors. LuciadCPillar does its best to find a good balance between these factors. It also offer various options to optimize visual quality and performance for your dataset, hardware, and use case.

Adjusting mesh detail and amount of data loaded

LuciadCPillar uses the scale information present in the source data to determine what tiles and level-of-detail to load at any given moment.

Sometimes, the scale information in datasets isn’t well-configured though, making it difficult to choose the right level.

You can adjust the amount of detail loaded using the qualityFactor settings on TileSet3DLayerTileSet3DLayerTileSet3DLayer. The default is 1.0. Increasing the value results in the loading of more data and detail. Decreasing the value reduces the amount of data.

These are our recommendations for use of the quality factor:

  • If you see low detail, or visible switches in level-of-detail when you are navigating, increase the qualityFactor.

  • If you experience bad performance, or your application starts using too much memory, decrease the qualityFactor.

Working with transparency

If your mesh data has transparent surfaces, or your colorExpressioncolorExpressioncolorExpression adds transparency, you must tell the layer to take this into account.

See Showing transparent colors on meshes or point clouds for more information.

Using GPU texture compression

LuciadCPillar can take advantage of GPU texture compression. This technique results in a far lower GPU video memory usage.

GPU texture compression works on most supported platforms. LuciadCPillar automatically detects which compression format to use, and converts textures on-the-fly.

If your environment doesn’t support GPU texture compression, this feature has no effect.

Because the benefits of GPU texture compression are significant, it’s enabled by default. It can introduce very small visual artifacts in the textures, though. These are seldom noticeable, but here are our recommendations for the usage of GPU texture compression:

  • Enable texture compression to display meshes with large textures, such as reality capture reconstructions.

  • Disable texture compression to display meshes with lookup textures, such as CAD models.

For more information, see textureCompressionEnabledtextureCompressionEnabledtextureCompressionEnabled.