I’m building a 3D game level in Blender for an iPhone game. It currently has around 5000 vertices and 4600 faces. I’m ordering a Mac soon so i can’t test out how well this level would run on an iOS device. It’s a really big level area wise (since I couldn’t use Unity’s Terrain tool I created a large terrain in Blender). Does anyone have any idea how well this will run on an iOS device? Also, are there any kind of optimization techniques I could use while building levels in Blender?
Which one? There are a number of them, with significantly varying capabilities. You can probably discount the oldest ones though, which have few users these days.
In the upcoming Unity 3.4, terrains work on mobile devices.
–Eric
Along with Eric’s comments I can tell you from past blender experience to make sure you set your default face primitives to triangles instead of quads; although Unity will do that on the fly for you when importing your mesh, you’ll have a much more accurate verts/faces count between model and imported model if you work in triangles from the start.
As far as optimizing in blender, the Decimate modifier is always useful for knocking down the face count in a controllable way with respect to “acceptable” levels of tessellation as is combining as many individual meshes as possible.
I have an upcoming release that features much higher face/vert count geometry and runs fine on a 3G model. @Eric, it even features Vectrosity! 