Best Practices & Performance

Best Practices

Planning

• Start with the entrance and the main route, then add rooms and branches.
• Think in spaces: tight passages lead to open rooms; a room is a good place for a choice, a fight or a view.
• Keep the main route readable; hide side branches behind bends.
• Use Save Layout before big changes.

Layout

• One point every 6–15 m on straight sections; more points in bends.
• Leave about 3 m of straight passage in front of every opening.
• Spread big height changes over distance: about 30° and below stays walkable.
• Keep bends wider than the passage is wide.
• Let passages cross at about the same height and at a clear angle; they become crossroads.
• Keep the cave object at scale 1. Change sizes on points or in the Passage Defaults.
• Rotate or move the whole cave with its object; the layout follows.

Look

• Mix sizes: a 4 m passage opening into a 6–8 m section feels natural.
• Use a different profile on a few points (Broad, Irregular) for variety.
• Add Distortion last; check clearance warnings afterwards.
• Use light colour and spacing to guide the player: warmer and brighter on the main route.

Workflow

• Leave preview quality on Standard while building; Final for the last checks.
• Use Clean in the overlay to judge the look without editing lines.
• Play Test often; it takes seconds.
• Bake for your game scenes. Keep the editable cave in a separate work scene, or next to the baked prefab with its object disabled.
• Never edit the objects under Generated by hand – they are rebuilt from the design at any time. Detach lights or bake first if you want to edit the result.

Performance

• Bake caves for your game; the preview is for editing.
• Passages are split into chunks of about 24 m, so the parts behind the camera are skipped automatically.
• LOD1 and the LOD group hide distant parts of the cave.
• Caves are ideal for Occlusion Culling (Window > Rendering > Occlusion Culling): rock hides almost everything around the next bend. Baked caves are already marked static for it.
• Lights cost more than polygons: keep shadows off for most cave lights, use Baked or Mixed light mode, and keep spacing generous. URP Forward lights at most 8 lights per object; Forward+ has no such limit.
• Statistics shows triangles and memory before you bake.