unfinished-b/nade-unity-virtual-geometry-engine-demo

This repository is a smaller, teaching focused demo version of NADE, a rendering system for the Unity 6 game engine that helps games draw very detailed 3D scenes more efficiently. It is built for Unity's HDRP graphics pipeline running on DX12, and is meant to be studied and learned from rather than used as a finished product, since a full production version exists separately. Games with lots of highly detailed geometry can slow down because the graphics card has to process every tiny triangle of every object, even ones that are far away or partly hidden. NADE addresses this by grouping a scene's geometry into clusters, choosing simpler versions of distant or hidden clusters automatically, and streaming geometry in pages so only what is needed loads into memory. It also handles shadows and hides geometry the camera cannot see, all in a way designed to keep the graphics card, rather than the CPU, doing the heavy lifting. To try it, you add an empty object to a Unity scene, attach the NADE component to it, click a button in its inspector to fix a required import setting, and press Play, which takes a snapshot of the scene's geometry and starts rendering it through NADE's pipeline instead of Unity's normal renderers. Because that snapshot is fixed for the length of a Play session, any edits to captured geometry only take effect after stopping and restarting Play, though lights, effects, and non captured objects can still be changed live. The README is upfront about what this demo version leaves out compared to the full project, including some shadow and lighting integration details, an editor menu, and support for newer graphics hardware features that Unity does not expose through its public tools. It also documents specific measured trade offs the author made, such as choosing a cached shadow update approach that costs a fraction of a millisecond per frame instead of a heavier virtual shadow map technique, with the reasoning and measurements included directly in the README. This project is aimed at Unity developers and graphics programmers who want to study how a cluster based rendering system can be built inside Unity's existing engine.