Hello, I’m still quite new in Unity but I already finished my first game, it was a FPS. At the beginning I made some objects like enemies and player controller but then I started adding some default components (like trees and rocks) and I noticed that objects I made were unnaturaly big, player object was ten times bigger than the default controller etc. Then I had few problems caused by my scale of objects, like for example maximum detail distance in terrain settings was too low for my giant characters, I had to set shadows distance and camera render distance too high and so on. Now that I’m about to start my second project I wanted to make everything smaller from the beginning and my question is will it cause any problems if I make every object too small? Will physics still work properly? Will smaller scene cause smaller lag? Does it make any difference at all and if yes, is it better to make object tiny or big?
I think the most important thing is keeping things consistent. I’ve had problems with artists before who would mess up their measurement settings in Maya or whatever and everything would come into Unity at wildly different sizes.
So long as you’re keeping everything consistent sizes, that’s most of your problems solved.
As far as setting distance detail, camera planes, shadows, etc: these are things that you only need to setup once. You can either scale your objects based on the default settings, or you can change the settings to match your scale. It’s entirely up to you.
Physics will be your main problem here. To make a large object appear to move as fast as a smaller object, you need to increase the velocity by some magnitude. This is also true of gravity: a large object falling will appear to move slower than a small object falling.
Naturally this is something you can configure in the project physics settings, but it’s absolutely something you need to think about when deciding on your scale.
Finally, no, the size of your objects should have no impact on lag: neither framerate, network interpolation or cpu usage will be tied to object size. Typically a larger view frustum would imply more things are being drawn in any given frame, but since it’s the same thing but larger it wont make any difference.