Is mesh merging/baking really worth it?

Hi, silly noob question here:
I thought that instancing a lot of times a few prefabs was the best way to optimize stuff, but then I stumbled upon mesh merging assets in the assets store and the wonders they promised, so I tried a couple of free/trial versions: in some case they lower batches and increase FPS, while in other scenarios they worsened the performance or mess up the scene.

I’d say that from my short experience If you already pay attention to optimization, use a few materials and reuse prefabs you can ignore mesh baking/merge assets.

Do you think that this is always correct or are there specific situations where mesh merging is almost mandatory? (I was thinking if it was worth to buy an asset to do mesh merging since the new year sale is on)

Thank you :slight_smile:

It depends on the layout of the world. If it’s mostly rooms and corridors then it’ll be best to have each room and corridor be a separate model and rely on Unity’s occlusion culling to disable the rooms that are out of view. But if it’s a large open world and the player can see the entire world and there’s lots of low poly assets then it’ll be better to merge them into a single mesh.

Unity already merges static meshes together at the start of a scene and so you shouldn’t need to do it yourself unless the scene is created procedurally. If it’s a procedurally generated world then you can use Mesh.CombineMeshes to merge everything together.