Understanding Vertex Performance: Planning Game

Unity Engine
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1

Reading the iPhone Optimizations in the manual, it states “Generally you should aim at 5K-10K vertices visible per frame.” I’m a bit confused and have a few questions, I was hoping to get some help with.

  1. Does this mean adding all of the objects in my scene, the vert count shouldn’t go over 10k? How do I determine this? I am looking at Statistics window. Is that giving me vert count per frame? For instance, I placed two copies of the penelope model into a blank scene and the Statistics window reports that I’m getting 2.2k verts. It seems, I can’t add many 3D characters to a scene.

  2. With the 10k vert limit, how can I have multiple characters in a scene? For instance, I want to create a game where you are tasked to shoot several creatures running towards you. What is the best way to handle this? My thought was to have skinned character models that are instantiated through code, but I’m wondering if the iPhone hardware can’t handle this. I have a Unity game, “Battle Bears” that is doing what I want in regards to numerous enemies in a scene and runs very well in my opinion. The bear enemies seem to be 3D models and not sprites. I understand having to optimize the meshes and have a low poly count as possible. I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to go about solving the issue of having numerous enemies in a scene.

  3. Finally, skinned meshes can’t be batched. Am I thinking about my game in an unrealistic sense in regards to having numerous skinned enemies in a scene?

Thanks!

Wes

2
  1. having 4 skinned meshes or alike is not going to insta kill your performance, don’t worry. Planning to have 10+ though would be unrealistic
3

Thanks for the info dreamora. This gave me an idea. Instead of using a skinned mesh, I was able to IK and constraints in modo and bake the transformations before exporting it to FBX. When it comes into Unity, the animation Take is there, but it doesn’t come in as a skinned mesh, which means dynamic batching now works! This solves my issue.

Cheers,

Wes

4

I did some more testing on this and with Unity 1.5 it seems that skinned meshes are batched. I tested this and it works. Would it then still be bad to have numerous skinned meshes? I am talking about having the same skinned mesh, my creatures, instanced so that it uses the same texture and material which would result in batched draw calls.

With skinned meshes, should I be concerned with more than draw calls for performance? I know I need to adjust the quality and have as few bones and bone weights as possible, but is having several skinned characters the wrong approach?

Thanks,

Wes