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Soft Edge from Maya to Unity

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by nikuskwas, Dec 2, 2007.

  1. nikuskwas

    nikuskwas

    Joined:
    Nov 2, 2007
    Posts:
    13
    Hello everyone!

    I am trying to import a low-poly model from maya to unity, but I want to include the Soften Edge information in it. Is there a way to do this in Unity? Any special tricks?

    Thanks,

    Nick
     
  2. AaronC

    AaronC

    Joined:
    Mar 6, 2006
    Posts:
    3,552
    Hi Nick, welcome

    At the top of Unity's project window is a settings button.

    Select your model, click settings, and uncheck the automatically calculate normals option.
    Cheers
    AC
     
  3. nikuskwas

    nikuskwas

    Joined:
    Nov 2, 2007
    Posts:
    13
    Great! Thanks Targos!

    Will this increase FPS in some way?

    Nick
     
  4. AaronC

    AaronC

    Joined:
    Mar 6, 2006
    Posts:
    3,552
    Possibly yes. Well my novice understanding is that when normals are softened, the engine calculates 1 vertex, when they are not, it calculates 1 vertex for every face sharing that point. I dont know if you would ever percieve the difference however, and I still dont know what degree of angle that that change occurs, ie:

    180 degrees = soft edge
    90 degrees = hard edge

    But what does 179 degrees equal?
    any takers?
    AC
     
  5. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

    Joined:
    Apr 8, 2005
    Posts:
    1,587
    Nope - In Unity, all the heavy processing is done when you import a source asset (maya file, photoshop file, etc). So whenever you change a source file, there's an import that gets executed. After that, the asset is stored in the optimal format for the game engine.

    Example:
    • You have a multi-layer PSD file, which you save.

    • Unity sees that the file has changed and does a reimport.

    • This flattens the psd, and (optionally) compresses it into DXT format (the compression which GPUs use), and then feeds this to the editor / game engine. The import settings for the texture is where you decide everything for this part of the process

    • You select "Build Game" - this grabs all the imported/optimized data (the flattened PSD file) and put that in a binary file which is optimized for fast loading. (and Unity also ignores any assets you are not using).

    • You've got a high-performing game, even though you used a multi-layered PSD file.
     
    Awss likes this.