Hi,
Just a quick question. Which iOs device generations can run and support normal maps? I’m just using a basic shader with a diffuse and normal map plugged in.
3GS and higher when you compile for OpenGL ES 2.0
but keep in mind that normal map requires pixellights which have a fair fillrate price especially if not used correctly, which is a major problem for 4th gen iphone / itouch and ipad1
all can if you don’t mind using world space normal mapping instead of object space normal mapping. Search forums for one by aras I believe it was. It’s not very useful on boned mesh objects though. Other than this you can try the mobile/spec bump shader, which is 3gs and above, but all forms of normal mapping are dreadfully slow, hoping unity 3.4 will have some optimised.
Thanks guys, So is it standard practice for current iOs developers to avoid normal maps and just use diffuse maps?
Whats an average joe using these days for a decent outcome and avoid performance complications and issues?
Well you can use normal and specular, on everything in the scene and it shouldn’t get much slower if any slower at all. Thats the beauty of the ios hardware, it is tiled and will discard shader pixels behind others providing they’re opaque.
So you can consider it a 1-time hit but you will probably lose say 60% of your gpu’s overall performance but it it seems really kind of stable ie using more models with the shader doesn’t slow it down any percieved amount.
Plus on 3gs, its quite quick due to the smaller screen dimensions. Aras and Rej have done an ultra optimised normal bump shader if you search the forums. It was linked to by jessy in a thread I made. They got the rendering down to 5.9 ms eventually for it - a feat if you ask me.