Can models slow your games down?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi i’m just wondering if alot of models can cause your game to slow down or even crash, the modelling program i’m thinking of using is Maya 3D, and i someone on youtube made a cool gun “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYgGjEPK6ng”

Say he uses unity and he puts this into his game and he has alot on screen at once, could this slow down his game?
And can highly detailed objects slow down games also?

Terrain
Oh and can huge terrain slow your game down aswell, here is a Just Cause 2 clip and i wanted to know if a large terrain can slow down your game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JayqYLCOkik
Second Clip: World of Warcraft’s Ironforge http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd2uSoXFeU0

Could this be done inside of unity with the basic terrain tools or is terrain created from a modelling in Maya 3D or other modelling programs.

Edit:Oh and can large models such as building slow down games aswell.
Clip:Grand Theft Auto 4 Empire Stae Building http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c_JGSmsZtA

Thanks for reading

2

It’s not the size, it’s the detail that slows down stuff.

3

Of course they will…nothing is free.

–Eric

4

Unity is capable of handling Billions of Polygons as “a whole” but “never all at one time.” If you position everything right and optimize your textures(by baking them), you should be able to fit in everything you need. Keep your polys at a minimum for decor type objects say 500-9000. Keep your buildings at 1000-30000 and keep your characters at 2000-7000. As long as Unity doesn’t have to “draw them all at one time” or all “as one mesh” (by using occlusion culling), all should be well.

So if you are making a complex model in Maya that has 60000 polys (which is the limit for a single mesh in Unity) cut the model into 6000 poly pieces and reassemble those pieces together when you import it into Unity.

5

actually the limit is 65k, but theres absolutly no reason to even get close to that number (even if its a huge mesh) you should size it down (which is really easy to do with 3ds max or maya). Keep in mind that not only does the number of polys matter, also the texture according to size of texture, and amount of textures you use. Learn about UV mapping to put all your textures into one, and keeping the size to a max of 1024x1024 respectively.

6

It also depends on your system But unity is friendly even to us who paid 2000$ for a Vaio with a 2.0ghz dual core!!!

And if your going to use Maya (2011) Please be aware of the extremely slow UI the Constant crashing and the weird bugs in 2011 edition everyone says its from OpenGL problems but i overlook it and deal with it

7

Eh…I hate maya past 8.5. Oh, let’s remove the compass and replace it with something useless. It’s not like anyone ever needs to measure objects accurately. And the constant freezing. Maya doesn’t age well :frowning:

As for models, polygon count isn’t very important when building for PC. What will kill you are the batch counts - one scene I generated a fores without batching. 5fps. Made script to batch them. 250fps.