Combining spatially separate meshes?

Questions & Answers
1

Let's say I have a scene with 100 green marbles and 100 red marbles. Would it make any sense to combine all the green into a single mesh and all the red into a single mesh?

First, does it make sense, and second, is there some simple way of say:

loop over marbles:
  We've got another green-marble
  Add it to the existing green-marble mega-mesh.

The marbles aren't going to be moving around independently. If they move it will be as an assembly anyhow (i.e. move all green marbles to the right by 10).

2

It might make sense. You can set up something pretty easy with `Mesh.CombineMeshes`.

I suspect that if you combine meshes every frame, though (to update individual rotation/positions of the marbles), it'll be slower than having 200 draw calls. You'll really have to just try it and compare performance numbers on your target min-spec machine.

3

Unity 3's batching should solve this for you if the vertex count of the marbles isn't too high.