I’ve been playing around with Blender and ProBuilder to help me with building a dungeon-esque game.
As I see it (and I’m open to counter-perspectives from folk who know these tools better):
Blender - can create anything, more time consuming, not natively Unity, will it have problems fitting together?
ProBuilder - faster, natively unity, limited to more primitive polygons, can’t do curves/smoothing easily
My biggest question right now is on scale. If I want to make a large level, say 2,000 meters (units) in length, am I going to run into problems later? Does this kind of approach impact rendering, game speed, etc?
Assuming that I start with just a plane (or a large, flattened cube) and shape accordingly, then add walls/doors/objects etc, what do I need to know / need to avoid?
I see a lot of clipping in games and various tutorials/demos and would really like to avoid this. How best to do this please?
Hope this is the right place to ask these questions. Thanks in advance.
Weather you want use blender, or other tool, to shape your world is up to you.
But for large worlds, with detailed terrain / caves, you want chunkify terrain, into sectors.
Then you want to use LOD, to unload high poly chunks, at far distance, and load chunks with high poly count, at close distance.
Thanks. The game design is wholly indoors with a series of rooms with walls and floor from isometric view. So I don’t need to render distances, just wondering if the scale of the objects affects performance even if off screen.
I’m trying to get a steer on whether one huge object as a floor is better/worse than many floor tiles joined together - or whether it makes no diffference.
Moving lower poly count is always cheaper in terms of performance.
100k poly count mesh is not an issue for PC, but on mobile, will take battery, when you want move about (moving screen). Depends what you are targeting. You can make also 1milion mesh, but remember, terrain is not only object on the map.
Also rendering like smaller meshes to load, when suitable.
But having FPS games with multiple characters over 10k poly is not unusual this days. + other models, terrain etc.
So I would suggest, try to divide into sectors.
This way, you can focus on quality indoor, now worrying too much, if is too big.
You can use 3D software for example, to create big high quality terrain, and use some slice function, for dividing evenly.
Just thoughts.
If your level is made up of a group of smaller objects than Unity has ways to reduce the rendering time by skipping objects that the camera cannot see. There’s a good explanation here:
If you’re entire level is one large object, then you’ll get no benefit from frustum culling or occlusion culling, from what I understand. Unity will have to render the whole thing every frame. This may or may not be a problem depending on how many polygons, (like @Antypodish was saying).
In any case, I like to build small modular pieces in blender and then assemble them into larger structures in Unity. The advantage of this is that you can iteratively play-test and make adjustments in how your level is laid-out.