So I found this awesome killer addon for Blender that helps make castles and really big structures really quickly. I’m just afraid that when I finish the game (even though it’s NOWHERE near complete), that it will lag the game out because of how many poly’s it has. One of my castles has 92944 Triangles (55k Verts and 50k Faces), and it isn’t really THAT detailed and its not textured yet. So is there any way reducing the poly count? Any way to see if it lags for the phone within Unity? Would the Unity Remote App test out to see if it lags or not? I’ve seen even bigger structures in mobile games, but I’m just afraid because I’m still rather new to modeling and still not sure the max poly’s that I’m able to have in a scene, and I’m able to not have in a scene and when, etc etc. So can anybody please shed some light no this? How much is “enough” and how much is “the maximum”. I can take pictures of the models if that would be helpful as well. Thanks.
Can you show us some wireframe pictures? Because now it’s hard to tell what needs to be optimized.
What’s stopping you from building to the device and testing it yourself? You’re going to have to sooner or later and you don’t need any game code to test framerate, just a fixed camera and an animation of your model spinning, and it will build. You could have already done that in the time it takes to post a question and wait for the vague “I dunno, it depends…” answers to roll in.
Poly count don’t really matter as much as materials, lights, and number of draw calls do. If you are using just one material, with a vertex colored unlit shader with all lighting baked to vertex colors- it will probably be very fast, even with that many tris.
Unity Remote will lag and look like crap no matter what, and has no bearing on its performance on the device, because it’s not running on the device, it’s running on your computer and streaming compressed video over the USB cable.
What is the killer addon?
@MikeUpchat: I think he may be using the “Add Mesh Walls” Blender addon.
It does create lots of faces - essentially I think because it builds each brick in a wall so that it can create openings and irregularity in bricks and grout size.
I personlly do not like it. I was brought up around and played in 12C castles and the bricks (essentially cube shapes) are too regular a structure.
cheers, gryff 
You could always use Blender’s mesh editing tools to manually reduce poly count. I’m sure that there are auto poly count reducers for Blender, but the algorithms used by them tend to make artifacts in your mesh.
Yes, I will post some wireframe pictures later (I’m in school right now), yes I am using Add Mesh Walls (nice guess), I don’t know how to use Blender mesh editing tools to reduce poly count, and how do I build the game and test it from my phone without releasing it on the app store? Thanks so far.
@foofy - not really a guess as I did the tutorial over at cgcookie.com a while back. Tutorial.
An alternative method to using that plugin, is to get a castle floor plan then use the techniques in this house building tutorial to create your castle:
At ~ 28.30 of the tut he shows you how to import the floor plan, and at ~11.00 he shows you the techniques to construct walls doors and windows. It seems backwards right The tut also shows you the problems you will run into (mainly normals) and how to fix them.
Ohh, and by the way, castles do not need round towers - they can be rectangular, octagonal or even D-shaped - often used at main gateways to a castle.
Search with google for “castle floor plans”. In the meantime here is a link to some floorplans : Wales Castles. Click on a castle and then the “Floor Plan” button
cheers, gryff
You could also look at editing some pre-built castles. TurboSquid has a free one with a pretty low poly count and still looks decent depending on what you’re wanting to do. I downloaded it actually just the other day and loaded it into Blender:
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/free-old-castle-3d-model/611084
FYI though… the textures are missing but it’s UV Mapped.
@foofy: According to the lower image you have 42 objects in this scene (see image below).
Is that “castle” made of 42 wall pieces - or do you have some objects hidden?
If it is 42 pieces of wall - approximately 1600 faces per basic piece - then it is not surprising that you have 50,000+ faces in your model.
From what I can tell from from the pictures, there are only 8 lengths of wall making up your castle - so where are these 42 objects?
cheers, gryff
What do you mean “42 wall pieces”? And also I believe I just have the 8 lengths, because I did not do anything else other than that. Anything other than that, I do not know about because I did not mean to do anything but to make those 8 walls.
@Foofy, the crop of your image shows 42 objects - what are they? Can you post the .blend file somewhere - so I can take a look?
cheers, gryff
Here you go. Thanks for taking the time to do this. =D
Ok foofy here is my first impression - all the walls apart from the front wall with the door have duplicates and in some cases triplicates of wall pieces. The image below shows you a list of them all. And, I have no idea what you did to create all these duplicates/triplicates.
In addition each wall section, except the front wall again, seems to be made of a base wall with an upper wall on top - so for those 8 walls you are trying to build you actually have 15 pieces. I don’t think this is necessary.
I’ll play with it a little more later tonight. Ohh, what version of Blender are you using?
cheers, gryff
Yes, I actually noticed this. I just did not know that they were duplicates/triplicates of what was already there. And yes, I on purposely did 2 walls and joined them together. But would it matter or make a difference though if I were to just make one big wall? Would there be less poly’s? I don’t think so because even though there is only 1 wall instead of 2, it will still be bigger, but please tell me otherwise, because that would be pretty useful. And I am using Blender 2.69.
OK Foofy, I have done some tinkering about.
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I have seperated one set of walls from all the duplicates in your file. All the others I have moved to the last objects layer. File: Castle1_1. blend. The basic castle you created now has ~ 19,000 faces.
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I have created a set of basic walls - 4 windows, no windows, and doorway/gateway - all have 750 or fewer faces. File: base_wall1b.blend
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And I have created a text file with the settings I CHANGED from the default values of the basic wall that gets added when you use the masonry addon to generate the above three files.
The basic size for these wall is 15 metres high and 20metres wide. You can scale them in Blender but if you do, remember to apply the scale before exporting to Unity.
You can download the .zip file containing the above files here :
Now just a couple of comments.
- I still think that that anything you build with this plugin will have an excessive number of faces when compared to building from scratch in blender - each brick has 6 faces with many of them essentially invisible.
- Your next problem will be texturing your build - it will be messy.
If you want to discuss the details of how and what I did, send me a private message with an email address that I can use to contact you. I don’t think this thread should become one where just you and I post stuff.
cheers, gryff