Some 30 000 vertices turned into 200 000 vertices

Unity Engine
1

Alright so um… I have this new model, which all-in-all is roughly 30k vertices, and I’ve checked this by printing out sharedMesh.vertexCount in Start() in a script… so I’m pretty confident nothing weird happened in the import.

So I’m curious… how can my scene vertex count with only this model have become ~200k?

The model does have 4 materials… does this mean that all vertices get processed at least 4 times per light?

I thought only the triangles/vertices with the respective material got processed on each material?

2

Is the thing triangulated?

3

See here. While this is a thread about the iPhone renderer, it still applies to regular Unity as well.

4

Hmm yeah I split my mesh up in the material parts… which cut the unity-reported vertex count to around 90k…

I’m not sure I understand that thread. Does it mean that the vertex count reported by Unity isn’t very interesting?

5

No, it reports how many verts are being sent to the GPU for processing. Each time your render an object, it sends the verts to the GPU, so if you have a material with two passes, it sends them twice. The stats window isn’t like 3D Max where it reports how many verts are in the scene, it reports what is being sent to the GPU for rendering. If you move your camera around, you will see the number change as certain objects are culled from rendering.
More than anything though, it’s there to help you improve performance, not to give you a total scene count. There are many different factors that can actually increase how many times a vert is sent, which is largely due to the underlying API (OpenGL, DX) and how it optimizes meshes for rendering.