Hello
i have a question about how to get the best performance.
Im going to build a city area with 80 houses based upon 5 seperate models. Can someone tell me what the best method is for texturing.
:!: Say… for the walls, rooftiles etc i can create seperate textures so i can tile them.
:!: Or i can combine the textures into one single image and tile it with geometry.
In the first option i have more seperate textures, more materials and more drawcalls.
but in the second option i have one drawcall but lots of geometry.
can someone explain me what would be the best aproach?
thanx in advance
There is no simple answer.
Usually the best approach is the one that minimizes both drawcalls and texture data.
Most of the times, when you try to merge all tiled textures into one big baked texture you will need much more memory for getting the same level of detail.
So, you will gain in decreasing the drawcalls but on th other hand you will need much more memory.
Unity gives you one small script named “CombineMeshes” that will merge into one mesh, several meshes with the same material.
If you place several buildings as child of one GameObject, you may use this script to combine all children.
Another drawback of combining to much objects, beside the limit of vertices per mesh, is the issue related with the culling algorithm select the giant mesh every frame and draw it.
If you have it separated into smaller meshes, the ones on your back won’t be selected for rendering by the culling algorithm.
Just try a few alternatives, and see which ones have a better performance/quality ratio.