Premade environment blocks

Hello! I hope this is the right section, but if isn't please direct me to the right one.

I'm trying to make a simple endless runner (didn't know the concept had a name when I got the idea) where I'd spawn premade environment blocks randomly to get a feel of continuity. I've seen a tutorial where they simply put different unity objects into a parent object and turn them into a prefab which they'd spawn when appropriate. To my beginnerish eyes it seems like a waste of resources as (if I'm correct) the parent prefabs will be spawning fully functional child objects with them. So my first thought was that it might be more efficient to do the blocks ready in Blender as then every block would just contain a single game object. But that way I'm creating lot's of bigger 3d models but using mostly the same smaller 3d objects as a base, so wouldn't that be a waste of memory or something? Which one of these approaches is the right one, or is there a sweet middle ground I'm not aware of?

 

An individual GameObject has very low overhead. Everything you reference in your scene, even referenced by prefabs which aren't instantiated in the scene, has to be loaded into memory when the scene is loaded. If you're not careful, creating all these additional models in Blender will actually increase your game's memory usage significantly.

It depends on your game, but when the number of GameObjects in the scene starts becoming itself an issue, we're talking about high hundreds or thousands of them active in the scene.

 

Okey, thank you very much. So basically: should my premade blender "scenes" exceed the amount of single 3d models I need to make a similar looking prefabs (if you can get a hang out of what I mean) it's more efficient to go just the prefab route and even before it's probably better because of the easier tweaking inside Unity?

 

It really depends on your Platform. If building for PC and consoles you probably dont have to worry about this and just prioritize your own workflow. But if working for Mobile Platforms you should work with prefabs as that really reduces a lot of drawcalls/polycount. There are other things that would help, Batching and GPU Instancing, look them up.