Hey everyone! I have a small character in my game and I was wondering what would be the least system taxing way to bring him in the game. What uses less resources, having a character with around 15 - 20 pieces of geometry for each individual body part with just transform animation baked onto it, or having a single poly mesh with 20 joints with baked animation? I’d prefer the joint method as the multiple geometry method will give me a number of hard creases at all the bend points, but I could go that way if it uses less resources.
The skinned mesh would be much more efficient. Look around on the forums for threads about reducing draw calls - its been discussed to death, but the short version is that each mesh requires its own draw call during rendering, and if you have 20+ draw calls your framerate will begin to suffer substantially. A character made of 20 seperate meshes would destroy your framerate, even if those meshes are very simple. Combining your meshes and using skinning or other tricks is necessary if you want a lot of action on screen.
Excellent! Thanks for the info! I just checked out how many draw calls I’m making and I’m hitting 80 :shock: so now I know what I should be looking for.