Procedural mesh generation vs tiled objects

News & General Discussion
1

I’m working on a 2.5D platformer and I’m thinking of a few different ways to tile walls etc.I have a set of basic tileable mesh prefabs and had an idea, but I’m not sure if it will affect performance.

My idea is to create an extension that will allow me to select vertices on the prefab and configure each of them to tile or stretch - then apply this “configured mesh” to another object (eg: a cube) to procedurally generate a single mesh that takes on the features of the original mesh.

I’ve attached a couple of example mockups:

My question is how much will this affect performance compared to tiling them manually, assuming that my level will be made up of a number of different sized boxes. I’ve been reading up about dynamic batching (and less draw calls), so I am assuming that the procedural meshes won’t be able to be batched - is this worth worrying about for a 2.5D platformer with low-detail models?

2

After a little more research, I realize my question is redundant - for anyone else who is wondering, meshes of different shapes can be batched - it’s the material and number of vertices that determines whether it should be included in dynamic batching, not the shape or size of the mesh (not including scale).

And in my case, a 2.5D platformer won’t have that many of these meshes on screen at once so it’s not really worth worrying about.

(Note: Still quite new to Unity3d, so I could be wrong - but these are the conclusions I’ve come to from reading through the documentation and experimenting)

3

If you generate your procedural mesh at startup and don’t change it every frame, it really shouldn’t make any difference in terms of performance. To the engine a mesh is a mesh, it doesn’t care how it was generated.