Hey,
To preface, we’re working on a webplayer based game.
We’re looking to reduce our material file sizes for our game by combining some of the material files used by our larger buildings.
One of the ideas we’ve tossed around is adding more polys to the building sides, setting them up in a grid fassion, and then overlaying their UVs
so that we can use a single, small, tilable material for all similar wall sections.
This of course brings up the question, what is ultimatley more taxing?
Half the amount of materials with twice as many polys verses twice the amount of materials with half as many polys?
Those aren’t accurate numbers of course, but it illustrates the trade we’re trying to decide on.
So before I go and change our base mesh, re-UV, and retexture our buildings, what have you found to be the best method?
Also, does anybody have experience creating texture atlases for Unity?
Thank you very much!
-NomArt
In part, this will depend on your version of unity. Pro has batching, so its going to do things like automatically combine your objects to be more efficient - and you can use that with occlusion stuff as well. It will combine materials, but it can’t combine textures. (make sure your referring to the right thing, so you know where to optimize).
If you wanna add more geometry, most platforms that is not a huge issue, and can be an efficient way to do things, and save texture space.
There is a bunch of ways you can go about creating an atlas - if your buildings are not to complex you can create different material zones in your texture sheet, then when your doing the unwrapping, you simply apply the pieces to the sections you want the texture spaces to be on.
Another way you can optimize things yourself is manually combining objects to lower your draw calls, depending on if/how your using occlusion, if your not using that, definitely combine the buildings and sub objects up to unity’s maximum to help reduce the draw calls down - try that before you re-model everything.