Hi there,
we are using wings3D to create our models for iPhone. We recently set up a character model that totaled 297 verts in wings. Now I know that the amount can increase when in Unity, but the fact that it has since doubled is not very reassuring. Can someone explain how to lower this? The optimum is 300, but 400 would be OK as well.
The object is one model with a single material.
All help is greatly appreciated.
Check your uv layouts that they don’t have seams, ensure that you have smooth face normals (-> also check the import dialog for that), check the material, don’t have lights
that are the basic things.
the stats you get in unity are not the vertices / tris on the model but the one sent to the gpu due to above factors
Let me get this straight - if I make the uv map more unified there will be fewer verts? I have already set smoothing.
What you are looking at is the amount of triangles actually being sent to OpenGLES for rendering. In addition to case where something like the material requires them to be sent twice, other things like hard-normals and non contiguous UV increase vertex/triangle counts significantly compared to what a modeling app or Unity iPhone 1.0.3 tells you. Triangles need to be contiguous in both 3D and UV space to form a strip, so when you have UV seams, degenerate triangles have to be made to form strips - this bumps up the count.
Previously Unity would report triangle counts incorrectly. This was fixed first in the run-time, and recently in the Editor. Now both will report the correct amount of triangles actually being sent to OpenGLES for rendering.
Please see this forum topic for more info: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=31493&highlight=triangle+strip
Dreamora, what exactly are seams? Can you please explain it? (guess you speak german: unter Nähte kann ich mir nichts vorstellen, in meinem Modell ist mir in der UV Map einmal etwas verrutscht und ich habe 8 Teile Pi mal Daumen wieder übereinander gelegt, ich hoffe es geht nicht darum)
I’m not sure if this is in the forum rules, but if you speak English, more people will be able to understand and learn from this. Not everyone understand German (I do a little).
I really hope that’s the true and you guys didn’t optimized everything for the new iPhones and left the other models behind because in one verison of unity things ran smooth, in this one everything goes choppy and slow.
Well I suppose that’s because iPhone’s hardware is choppy and slow if you compare it to your PC? 
If seriously, please try to optimize your stuff for iPhone CPU and GPU. We put lots of tips and tricks in manual. Should be handy.
seams are borders on the UV where the UV data don’t flow continously.
If there is a split of UV data on a vertex where the left triangle has other UVs than the right one, then the vertex needs to be dublicated because 1 vertex can’t have 2 UVs