Which is a better method to build a level for an iphone game. To use the SpriteManager in unity or to build sprites using poly plane in maya with an alpha blended texture?
if the polygon plane all use the same material then it does not make a difference
since 1.5 you can basically even use distinct planes as long as the use the same material due to the dynamic batching
I tend to REALLY like using Sprite Manager 2. I find it to be a solid piece of code. I love the atlas builder, and the new animation timeline.
As Dreamora mentioned, if you are already using the same material one multiple objects, batching is supposed to take place.
Performance-wise, Maya and SpriteManager 2 are more or less equivalent since they both use batching. But in terms of which is “better”, SM2 provides lots of sprite animation features that you won’t get just from a quad made in a 3D modeler. I strongly encourage you to take a look at the demo videos available here:
http://www.anbsoft.com/middleware/sm2
Maya! don’t use 3rd party code.
if you do UV animations through model or code is really a no topic as the lengthy thing is reupload of the mesh data after each change
Right, what I meant was, if you use Maya (or any 3D modeler) just to make quads that will be used to draw sprites in-game, Unity will batch them (provided they all use the same material), so in that sense, the performance will be similar. But using a 3D modeler won’t provide you any sprite animation capabilities - or if you use UV offset or some similar method, it won’t be nearly as flexible and you’ll have to do a fair bit of work yourself to get it to work the way you want. SM2, on the other hand, handles it all for you. SM1 does a lot of this as well, but the performance isn’t quite as good as SM2 and is more difficult to use than SM2.