Help with Skybox Alternative. Need solution less then 6 Batches! that works with fog

Unity Engine
1

Hi,
So working on a phone game and targeting a 50 batch max. We just discovered our sky-box that we only have two textures on takes up 6 batches regardless. Looking at the material code it makes total sense why this is.

I’m thinking I could just model a big cube with one huge texture and cut this down to 1 batch getting 10% of my performance back but to do this and still use fog I’d need a material that ignores it.

Is there a way to make a material that is not effected by fog?

Other then creating a cube does a cheaper skybox material exist? (that only uses two textures?)

Thanks for any help, I’m far from a material expert.

2

So I have a material working that doesn’t get effected by fog. Sadly the next problem is that my camera clip distance won’t let the object render (being that it is too far away) Not sure how to fix this one.

3

Create a 2 camera setup where one camera only renders the skybox and the other camera renders everything else.

You could also make the skybox cube much smaller and simply have it follow the position of the camera to make it appear infinitely far away.

4

Thanks Antenna Tree. Didn’t even think about the fact that the shader draws behind everything else. Totally going with the small cube with position attached to camera method!
Thanks!

5

Why not use a skydome instead of a skybox?
Use a material that acts the same as skybox, instead you can only add 1 texture.
The texture you’ll be using would be a spherical sky texture. Assign that and you got a skydome with less batches =)
I used that for my mobile tests, but I didn’t use fog, so I used just a normal material in my render settings with this spherical texture.
The mobile I was developing for didn’t had any hardware 3d acceleration, all just software and worked fine.

6

Since every point on your sky box or dome should be equidistant from the camera, I would recommend not leaving fog up to the shader. Instead, either build the desired fog level into your sky texture, or apply it universally in the shader.