can anyone help me understand how PhotoDome loading works? I’m experiening a scene freeze whenever i try to load in a new image, if that image has a high resolution (8k or 16k). I thought I could create a new PhotoDome in the background, wait until it’s loaded and then make a crossfade animation to transition from one image to the next smoothly. The problem is that when I’m creating a new dome the entire scene freezes until it’s completely loaded.
I’ve tried putting the dome creation in a separate async function, and caching all the images but it doesn’t seem to help.
Also, creating multiple instances of PhotoDomes at the start is not an option, since I have about 30 images I need to swap between and I don’t think loading 30 16k images would be a great solution.
Hi,
I think you should not attempt to create a new dome. I would rather either change the material.diffuseTexture or source. However, changing the source will create a delay when swapping (so I found). Whereas, changing the texture and disposing of the old one seems to work.
There’s still a problem however is when you load the image, even async. The scene freezes for a little while whilst loading.
I’m sure we did read about this in this forum. I think it was a skybox but it should be the same. May be you can make a search in the forum and quickly find this post. Can’t remember if there was a proper solution for this. Else, ez enough would be to ask the expert @Evgeni_Popov on how to best handle this.
In this very rushed PG, I demonstrate that when initializing the load of the image, the scene quickly freezes.
And basically, not very clean and quickly done, this is how I would likely switch between textures. Although, I’m far from being an expert (not even a good coder ) But yeah, I think at least for the approach I would likely look into something similar.
Edit: forgot to mention that the timeout in PG is essentially to be able to differentiate between the loading of the texture and applying it.
I agree, creating a new dome on each transition might not be optimal. I’m using 2 domes beacuse i want to make a cross-fade transition between 2 images (so animate the first image’s opacity from 1 to 0 and at the same time the 2nd image’s opacity from 0 to 1). So I kind of need to use 2 domes, but I guess there’s no need to actually create and dispose a 2nd dome each time, I could just use the same 2 domes for every transition and hide the one which i don’t need at any given time.
This seems like a similar problem, I don’t know if this is the one you were referring to?
OK, I see. Yes, makes senses. I believe you can use visibility to animate the transition.
Correct. I wouldn’t rebuild a photodome each time on the fly. You can set the inactive to not ‘isVisible’ or ‘setEnabled(false)’.
No, it was a more recent one but I kind of recall this has been discussed a few or a number of times.
Only thing is I don’t seem able to find it just now (probably not using the right keywords). May be it wasn’t even a photodome or a skybox. May be simply looking for caching textures or preload assets or something? Sry that I cannot be of more help. If I find it later I’ll post it here. Else, in the meantime, may be someone else will pass by with the answer (hopefully)
) But yeah, I think at least for the approach I would likely look into something similar.