✨ Particle & Animation Occlusion Culling (Minecraft 26.2)

In vanilla Minecraft, subterranean lava drips, cave dust, portal particles, and torches generate hundreds of particle quads behind solid stone walls that are submitted to the GPU. Simultaneously, animated block texture atlases continually upload frame data to the GPU even when the player is paused in singleplayer or sitting in modal menus.

Camera Culling introduces high-speed particle line-of-sight checks and atlas upload suppression.

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📋 Particle & Animation Culling Infobox

Property	Value
Particle Target	SingleQuadParticle.extract(QuadParticleRenderState, Camera, float)
Animation Target	TextureAtlas.cycleAnimationFrames()
Proximity Safety	4.0 meters ($16.0\text{m}^2$) around camera
Max Particle Distance	64.0 meters ($4096.0\text{m}^2$)
Atlas Pause Trigger	Singleplayer game paused OR no active level/player

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🌪️ Particle Occlusion Pipeline

Particle Generated at (X, Y, Z)
        │
        ▼
[1] Distance <= 4m? ──────────► RENDER (Proximity Bubble)
        │ No
        ▼
[2] Distance > 64m? ──────────► CULL (Far Cutoff)
        │ No
        ▼
[3] Inside Solid Block? ──────► CULL (Encased)
        │ No
        ▼
[4] Visual Clip Raycast Blocked?
        ├── Yes ──────────────► CULL (Occluded)
        └── No ───────────────► RENDER (Visible)

1. Proximity Safety Bubble (4.0m): Particles emitted within 4 meters of the camera are rendered unconditionally in $< 0.0001\mu\text{s}$.
2. Far Distance Cutoff (64.0m): Particles generated beyond 64 meters are culled to protect GPU quad fillrate.
3. Solid Block Enclosure: If the block coordinate BlockPos.containing(x, y, z) has isSolidRender() == true, the particle is dropped immediately.
4. Visual Clip Raycast: Projects a ClipContext.Block.VISUAL ray from camera position to the particle vector. If an opaque solid block intercepts the sightline with $> 0.35\text{m}$ margin, rendering is skipped.

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🎬 Block & Texture Atlas Animation Freezing

Texture atlas animations consume GPU bandwidth to cycle frame indices.

Camera Culling checks AnimationCullingHelper.shouldPauseAtlasAnimation() in TextureAtlasMixin:

• If singleplayer is paused (mc.isPaused() == true), atlas uploads are frozen.
• If sitting on the title screen, in modal menus, or disconnected from world, background texture cycling is halted.

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🔗 Related Pages

• Entity Occlusion Culling
• Commands & Configuration
• Return to MC 26.2 Overview