SceneKit on OS X with thousands of objects

Question

I\'m following this tutorial: http://blog.bignerdranch.com/754-scenekit-in-mountain-lion/

I\'m interested in using Scene Kit, but my scenes might potentially have th

Answer 1

How best to do this depends on exactly what you're looking to accomplish.

Are these thousands of points (a star field backdrop for an outer space scene, perhaps) static, or do they need to move with respect to each other? Do they actually need to be spheres? How much detail do they need?

If they don't need to move independently, merging them into a single geometry is a good idea. On Mavericks (OS X 10.9) you don't need do mess with geometry data yourself to do that — create a node for each one, then parent them all to a single node (not your scene's root node), and call flattenedClone to get a copy of that node whose geometries are combined.

If they don't need to have much detail, there are a few options for improving performance.

One is to reduce the segmentCount of the sphere geometry — you don't need 5000 triangles to draw a sphere that'll only be a couple of pixels wide when rendered, which is about what you get with the default segment count of 48. (If you're going to mess with the geometry data or flatten nodes immediately after reducing the segment count, be sure to call [SCNTransaction flush] to make sure it gets updated.)

Another is to reduce the triangle count further. Are the stars (or whatever) small enough that they even need to be spheres? If your scene can be set up so they're always oriented toward the camera, SCNPlane might be better — with its minimum segment count it's just two triangles.

Do they even need to be triangles? Scene Kit can render points — there's not a SCNGeometry subclass for them because it's generally not useful to independently position and transform single points. But you can create a custom geometry using an array of vertex positions and the SCNGeometryPrimitiveTypePoint geometry element type. And if you want to customize the rendering of single points, you can attach shaders (or shader modifiers) to the geometry.