[Maya] Optimizing my models/materials/textures for Unity

I'm trying to nail the most efficient workflow for texturing my meshes for Unity. What I have at the moment is a character with 5+ different mesh objects (head, body, jacket, pants, feet, gloves, eyes and more), which brings him to just as many separate materials. I'm aware that this will knock my Draw Calls up by quite a bit -- quite a bummer on mobile devices -- and is very inefficient, and that the Unity optimization guide not only suggests minimizing materials, but minimizing the number of Skinned Mesh Renderers pulled in.

The obvious solution to both of these problems would be to combine all of my meshes into a single mesh, so that not only does Unity pull in a single Skinned Mesh, but only pulls in a single Material/Texture page; However, combining my meshes is a (obviously reversible, but) destructive operation and would increase the difficulty of any further tweaks to the model, especially on parts such as the jacket, eyes, etc. I can always save a pre-combined copy to roll back to if something goes down, but it's an unappealing hitch nonetheless.

My goal is to optimize my character for Unity, so will my mesh simply have to be combined into one object by the time I'm ready to export for Unity in order to make the engine happy, or is there another workflow that allows me to retain my mesh as separate pieces (and possibly separate texture pages) and keep my draw calls to a minimum?

Thanks!

 

Optimization is a final stage anyway. What is suggested there, is the right thing, it will optimize your model. So especially if your targeting mobile you want to reduce your draw calls there.

Don't optimize till your not going to tweak anymore, and always keep a backup just in case.