Maya LT Beginner questions

Hello all,

I'm new to 3D modeling and have been watching a lot of tutorials to the point where I *think* I'm ready to start fumbling through my first simple room - a bedroom. But I've quickly run into some things that I'd like to know if there's a "right" answer to from a "I plan to use this in Unity" POV.

- There's of course multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. For example, to make a floor I can create a plane, then for walls I could either create four rectangles in the right shape and just position them correctly. Or, I could make an edge loop on the plane and extrude walls upward. If I extrude, I have yet to figure out how to give the walls a different material from the floor - but all the geometry is "connected". If I place walls as pieces it's straight forward to give them a different material. But, is either of these approaches "More correct" for something I want to use in Unity? Is there an advantage to having them be connected in a single mesh vs just positioned to "fake" it?

- When I start modeling furniture for the room, should I be modeling it as a separate mesh in the same scene within Maya, or should I make everything a separate file and then do placement in Unity's scene. Are there pros and cons to each? If say, the bed is a separate mesh in Maya does it import into Unity in a way that I could use it in different scenes anyway or is separate files the only way to do that?

Thanks for any tips!

 

If all of the walls are connected or combined, and have one material and one texture, or texture atlas applied to them, that means one draw call. But if the floor is a separate mesh, with it's own material and texture, the walls and floor are two draw calls, and this is okay for game performance.

If the walls and floor are all one whole single mesh, with one material/shader applied to it, and has a texture atlas, that contains the texture details for the walls and floor, then that means it's only one draw call. This is good for performance.

4 separate wall pieces each with their own material and textures, means the computer has to process 4 different objects. And if the floor is a seperate mesh, then that is 5 objects to process. That is 5 draw calls. I recommend going with the two options I mentioned above, unless there is some special reason, you want 4 separate wall pieces and a separate floor piece.

And feel free to learn about batching, static batching, dynamic batching, and texture atlases for more info. Since these things can help make your game run better.

 

Yeah, this might be good way, to get the correct size of the furniture for the room.

Make a copy of the project file that contains the room, and rename it furniture. Then make the furniture in that project file. Then delete the room, so it only contains the furniture in that project file.