Model, animation and texture specifications

Target Platforms Mobile
1

Hi guys,

I have been searching for this info, but haven’t been able to find it yet. If there a FAQ about this, or any links people can point me at?

We are about to start our first Unity development for iPhone, and our artist wants to know details like:

  • Texture specs
  • Rig type/setup
  • Animation blending
  • UV Maps used?

Also as an aside, is it possible to swap out a model (e.g. as the player robot powers up), or parts of a model (e.g. as the player robot upgrades its gun arm) on the fly?

Any help much appreciated

2

there are no specs, fully depends on your game on how far you can go.

the only requirements are: bone rigged, UV textures with up to 2 UV sets and at max 2 textures per triangle.
optimally a single rigged mesh (so no, no part swapping) as you otherwise create additional draw calls

3

Thanks for your reply.

Imagine that this is a character selection screen. The user is selecting their robot. It is standing on the screen and animating, but the background is very simple. But I still want to keep the frame rate up around 20fps or higher.

The user selects a different ‘gun arm’ and that part of the model is replaced.

Would this be possible (speed/resources-wise) without swapping the entire model, considering that there is not much else happening to drop the frame rate?

4

There should really be no problem. Especially being a robot, you can build your mesh and have every “upgrade” piece in the same mesh controlled by a bone, then at runtime you can move this bones and parent (and un-parent) them to others.

5

Great - thanks for the responses

6

There are methods to reduce draw calls by combining meshes animating them individually as bones. I’m not sure about the ability to instantiate/destroy new meshes on the fly with this method (maybe someone better informed than myself can jump in on this point?) but you could certainly transform the position of ‘unwanted’ arms outside of the camera view swap in the arm you want. There’s a script on the Wiki I think a couple of posts on the subject here in the forums.

7

Hi Pixelcocoa - that is a very nifty solution. Anybody who has more information about this - feel free to chip in :slight_smile: