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Help with atlases and building optimization

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by mendoman, Dec 31, 2018.

  1. mendoman

    mendoman

    Joined:
    Nov 24, 2017
    Posts:
    3
    Hello all,
    I was wondering if more experiences folks could share some tips on best practices how to achieve better fps. I decided to take a leap of faith, and started developing my game with the new HD Render pipeline. My game is going to be a 3D adventure game with 3rd person camera.

    I'm currently building a village, and my buildings consists of building blocks like base downstairs walls, upper floor, roof, house additions, dormers, chimneys etc... My complete buildings have different numbers of these building blocks.

    I have used 9 different materials in Blender, and my building blocks' UVs are mapped so, that I don't need tiling features. I was thinking that maybe I should combine textures and create one big atlas, but should I also combine the materials? Now I have 9 different materials, like stonewall, rooftiles, metal etc. so should I merge them to a single material?

    Also should I combine the meshes too? Like when I build my houses with these building blocks in Blender, should I merge the meshes when one of my house is complete. Complete houses range between 10k - 20k verts, so they should fit inside Unity. (As a side question, is 10k-20k too high for modern games?) I suppose I can drop draw calls to 1 per building this way, but is it bad, that Unity engine still have to calculate lets say Chimney mesh even if my player is on the other side of the house, or is reducing draw calls more important?

    Of course all other ideas that you might have how to optimize buildings for Unity 3D are all welcome. I know these might seem like really basic things to veterans, but it's really hard to find good answers to these kind of questions, so I'd appreciate all the help I can get.

    Edited to add: Also I've noticed that when I bring my buildings to Unity either as blend files or .obj, somehow 15k verts building becomes 167k verts building in Unity ( at least in stats window ). Is there something I can do to prevent that?

    Edited to add2: Nvm, I think I figured that out verts problem. It's not the number of mesh vertices, it's the number of vertices that's being rendered. Like disabling shadows etc. will drop down that number.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
  2. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5,181
    http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments


    Faith won't get you anywhere. Education will. Take time to thoroughly study and experiment with this stuff so you can understand how it works. Nobody can give a straight answer to questions like this without knowing your project in full detail, and ain't nobody got time for that.


    There is division of labor in games for a reason. It's too much work. I would recommend learning how to do one thing at a time. Figure out how to make your enviro models and understand the common practices for optimization, and then when you've got that under control come back and start studying what to do with it inside the engine.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
    Ryiah and zombiegorilla like this.