calculating the number of vertices before importing

Questions & Answers
1

I know there is a limit of 65.000 vertices per mesh and that the number of vertices in my 3d software is not the number that it will have after importing it to Unity.

My question: is there any way or approximation to calculate the number of vertices it will have in Unity before importing it?

I have to make a real-time walkthrough with a scene that was modeled for rendering purposes. The meshes are many and they are huge, but I can split them with a script in my 3d sw. My problem is that I don’t know if it will fit into Unity after I split them. Some do, some don’t, even with a vertex number that’s far below the unity maximum (i.e. 18000).

Is there a way to make a good guess? What are the mesh properties I should take into account?

2

Not sure exactly about Unity, but in general meshes are split at UV edges, material edges and smoothing groups, when imported in a realtime engine, since one XYZ vertex can’t have more than one UV coordinate and one material and engines in general interpolate the vertex normals over the complete mesh, unless an edge is split. If you split your edges according to these rules in your 3d app, you should get a fairly accurate (if not completely accurate) vertex number.

Also you could try exporting the model as 3ds, if possible, since I think it has the same 65.536 vertex limit.