BGE MakeHuman character hair disappears when close to edge of camera frame

Question

I have been working on a game using a MakeHuman character. Everything works fine except occasionally when the characters head is near the top of the camera's view it's hair will momentarily disappear and shortly reappear. It doesn't look like this happens with other parts of the character, just his hair. I have been through the texture settings many times and am fairly convinced this is not a texture issue but something else that is causing this behaviour. I have tried multiple characters and they all act the same. The camera's focus is on the character's feet, so it's head often goes out of camera view. Any suggestions? It's hard to post and example blend because it seems to be tied to the way my character moves, which is buried in a lot of code and controller only.

Answer 1

Background

The deformed mesh leaves the original bounding box. This let the renderer assume there is nothing to render, so it can save processing time.

On armature action playing the bounding box does not change with the mesh deformation. When you move the hair away from that box it can quickly be skipped from render.

Solution

Keep your deformed mesh within the original bounding box.

two basic ways to get that

• ensure the animation stays within the limits
• ensure the original bounding box is big enough the fit the deformations you want to play

The last point can be achieved by adding some isolated vertices to the mesh. (isolated vertices are not rendered).

Alternative

update the bounding box with python ... not recommended as it eats a lot of processing time.

Glossar

• Bounding Box a box that fit tightly around a mesh (on global X,Y,Z coordinates)
• Original Bounding Box the bounding box around the mesh with the pose when the object was loaded (the scene was loaded)

Reference

objects disappearing at edge of camera?