Hi all,
just been reading up on Unity and optimal polygon counts for characters on mobile devices. I presume this link means tris when it mentions polygons? can someone confirm?
cheers
Unity as well as the graphic cards itself will render everything as triangles. A triangle is a polygon. Of course not every polygon is a triangle, but every polygon can be splitted into triangles and that’s what every GPU / graphics interface does when you actually provide it a polygon. In Unity you can now create / import quad meshes (a mesh that only consists of quads). However under the hood it will be rendered as triangles anyways.
The triangle or polygon count is actually a bad indicator of the complexity of a mesh. You shouldn’t hold too tight to the “recommended” numbers. Every mesh / model is different. For example it makes a difference if you can actually see all triangles of a mesh at once or if about half of them are on the backside. It’s not like the back facing triangles are not there, but it usually renders a bit faster. Likewise mobile devices usually have weak fillrates, so it’s more important to avoid overdraw or expensive fragment shaders.
So the answer is yes: When someone talks about “polygons” in Unity he usually means triangles.