I have the free version of unity 3, I am wondering what types of culling I have access to? Does it automatically do backface culling? Can I set culling planes for objects that are so far away that they don’t get drawn? Thanks.
Backface culling should be handled automatically by the hardware. Unity performs frustum culling as well; the camera parameters (near and far plane distances, field of view or orthographic size, aspect ratio, etc.) will determine how the frustum planes are configured. You should be able to cull objects past a certain distance by setting the ‘far plane’ distance appropriately.
I’m not sure what (if any) culling is done beyond that; my understanding is that the iPhone version does some additional culling (based on occlusion), but that up until Unity 3 at least, non-iPhone versions of Unity have performed frustum culling only.
You can probably find out more by searching the forums for ‘culling’ (I seem to remember there being a third-party library available that performs additional culling beyond the default frustum culling).
So is there any difference for the pro and free version then. By the sound of it there isn’t. And thanks for the help!
Occlusion culling is not only for the ipho… In unity 3.0 you can do it in Pro for all platforms.
And it is a Pro only feature on all platforms, without pro / pro addon its not available, neither on desktop nor on mobile platforms