Individual prefabs vs prefabs of prefabs for performance?

Hi - I want to scatter trees around to make a dense forest, but obviously it increases my poly count a lot. I was wondering if there is any performance benefit from first making prefabs of tree groups, and then scattering these groups around, vs just scattering the trees around individually. Eg. 10 x group of 10 instances vs 100 individual instances

I guess the CPU/GPU has to draw the same number of faces whichever way, but I wondered if grouping them would make it work less 'hard' somehow.

Or is there any other way to create a realistically dense forest, without maxing out my poly count? Thanks.

 

Use vegetation studio. It has instancing support

 

I had good success almost recreating the density of a southern Appalachian sub tropical rainforest using the Unity Tree Creator and creating clusters of trees. SpeedTree was a big slowdown gorgeous as it was. If you buy terrain kits they usually have proprietary workflows.

 

As far as I know, prefabs are just an editor convenience feature, and won't have any affect on performance vs individual objects.

 

You might look into a Mesh combiner asset which can reduce your draw calls substantially.

 

Thanks for confirming kdgalla- I've been using a prefab painter which just creates all the instances under one container object, and I wondered if this would be less efficient that cloning predefined groups, but I guess not - end of the day it's the same number of faces...

 

Thanks Stain - I will investigate.

 

GPU Instancing is the approach used to render many copies of the same mesh in an optimal way.
This is how tools like Vegetation Studio Pro are able to achieve performant results with lots of trees and grass.