iPhone Modeling Question

Target Platforms Mobile
1

Can I build my main character model with a “ball and socket” armature? I supose this would require having the rig be made up of separate objects. Is this a bad idea. Should I just stick with the basics. I am using blender for anyone responding with ideas.

Thanks!

2

Are you doing this to avoid skinning, and the complications that arise therein? In theory, that would be a decent idea, as skinning isn’t as fast as object-level animations. Problem is, you can’t currently get object-level animations in from Blender like that. Blender is also lame, in that you can’t actually parent to a bone. When you tell something to parent to a bone, it just skins all the vertices to it with a strength of 1. You can use constraints, but that won’t translate to Unity. Bad business.

3

Thanks Jessy,

I had no idea that conatraints do not import to unity from blender. I guess I need to just skin the armature.

4

An alternative would be to use constraints to bones in Blender, and then perform actual parenting in Unity. (Just drag the mesh objects onto the names of the bones.) You’d probably want to create a post-processing script to handle this for you if you had even a small number of meshes in the scene.

5

Hey Jessy,

Another question, I’m racking my brain trying to get my main character polycount down. I’m at 550 poly or if I use the poly reducer script I get around 912 tris. Do I need to get this number lower or can I make up for the high number of tris somewhere else like in the game levels?

Thanks

6

Can’t answer that for you. Technically, it will run. It’s not like there’s a poly limit above which your game won’t run; the same 2^16 vertex limit is present in all versions of Unity (vertices is really the important number, not triangles, although last I heard, batching was actually based on triangles and not vertices.) For reference, though, my partner modeled a skinned character with these stats:

Blender reports:
901 vertices, 862 faces

Unity reports:
1.4k vertices, 3.5k triangles

…and that’s running fine. Less would be better, of course, for performance, but if you’re meeting your framerate goals, you’re fine. (Mine are 60 fps for the 3GS and 30 for the iPod touch 2G). I’m sure there are a few topics here and at answers.unity3d.com, but my best hint to you is to avoid hard edges and UV seams whenever possible. And if you need them both, put them in the same place. When you utilize these, you increase the vertex count.

7

That was a bug which was removed a while ago; it was supposed to be 300 vertices or under but was 300 tris or under until it was fixed.

–Eric

8

Thanks for the tips. My model is at 540 verts without running the poly reducer script. The model is made of a few meshes so I’m going to have at least 7 seams that I can think of off the top of my head. Is there anything I can do to prevent taking a performance hit?