I currently have a single gold coin modeled, imported into Unity, and made it a prefab. Now I also want to make a pile of gold coins with the same coin so I can make something like a treasure room. What would be the best way to do this performance-wise?
In Blender, I duplicated that single coin many times and spread them out to make a gold pile. Then rendered an image from the top view to use as a texture. I then modeled a low poly mesh in the shape of a gold pile and put the texture on it. The problem is that it looks very flat when done this way.
I was wondering if it would impact performance if I made a gold pile from the coin in Unity by duplicating the prefab multiple times and then turning the finished gold pile into another prefab. Once a prefab is loaded, does it have to load it again for each instance of it?
I did some searches but most of the results were related to gold farming.
In Unity, there is a built-in script ( CombineChildren.cs + MeshCombineUtility.cs ) for combining mesh in the children object ( Assets → Import Package → Scripts ).
The following is the comment from the script:
/*
Attach this script as a parent to some game objects. The script will then combine the meshes at startup.
This is useful as a performance optimization since it is faster to render one big mesh than many small meshes. See the docs on graphics performance optimization for more info.
Different materials will cause multiple meshes to be created, thus it is useful to share as many textures/material as you can.
*/
So, by parenting all your coins to an empty object and attach CombineChildren.cs to the empty object. A new mesh containing all the coins’ meshes will be generated at runtime; and according the comment “it is faster to render one big mesh”.
P/S: If all the pile of gold coins are going to look the same anyway (or you are going to have just 3-5 different looking piles), you can just join them in Blender as one object before exporting it to Unity (so you would not need to combine them in runtime).