I’m not sure who is beta testing Unity iPhone 1.1 but I’m working on my next game already and I don’t know when 1.1 is coming out.
I want to prepare my projects for when 1.1 comes out.
My question is about draw calls.
Right now I am using 3D Studio Max to do a single mesh animation with bones + skin.
I noticed that the skin’s envelope has to encompass every vertex on the mesh or else it won’t import into Unity correctly via FBX.
My bones + skins setup sometimes gets in the way and makes near by vertex bend when I don’t want it to. Maybe I’m not setting it right but it gets annoying.
I found it easier to separate movable parts into its own mesh and link it to dummies which are attached to the bones. This way the mesh doesn’t get distorted. I want a rigid animation. Doing this with the current unity will give it multiple draw calls.
Now the question is. Will Unity 1.1 allow me to break the parts up into individual meshes and animate with 1 draw call given that they all share the same material?
I would like to try the current beta if possible. Thanks
They say for small objects, if your parts are on the same hierarchy close enough, i guess yes.
On the other hand, skinning is almost twice speed in UT iPhone 1.1. Lots of people says that their game boosted from 30-40% up with 1.1 beta.
Btw, beta program is closed now.
What would be considered a small object? How many faces/verts ?
From their Unity iPhone RoadMap blog:
So for your characters it should work. But, in case you r animating by hand each part of your character inside Unity, try to solve your skinning problem, cause the new Unity 1.1 is using more faster skinning technique, so it worth the effort. 
Btw, Unity iPhone 1.1 will be released next week.
Tom is not sure the day, but it will be next week! 
And you’re asking the general population to potentially violate the beta program terms by speaking about it publicly. It’s a private beta, beta testers who talk about it publicly risk expulsion from the program.
The program is over full at this point and the Unity iPhone 1.1 release is coming out next week so just hang in there as it’s literally days away.
Have you tried the CombineChildren script on the wiki? It should be possible to have rigid animation like you describe with a single skinned mesh object, as long as the bone weights are ‘all or nothing’ values and the different moving parts don’t share any vertices.
I’d be interested to know this too. We’ve looked briefly at the CombineChildrenBones script, but waiting for 1.1 to see if it’s a necessary avenue to pursue. We have models with animations imported form C4D as FBX are looking to reduce draw calls, as it brings in the animated elements as separate meshes, as you’d expect.
If 1.1 automatically combines meshes that share a material and retains their animation, that would be a big win for us.
Roll on next week…
I had been wondering about the drawcalls on my mesh as well.
I have a segmented character that needed rigid body animation rather than a contiguous mesh deform.
Basically, what I found out is that by having my character as one mesh…and bone weighting the movable parts either 0% or 100%…allows Unity to see the mesh as a single draw call. The bone pivots were placed where the rotational joints should be on my mesh and all the parts move and rotated perfectly. The bones show up within Unity hierarchically as they are set up in your 3d app.
Pretty cool actually.
Just be sure that the various parts you want to move or rotate don’t share points.
Woops I wasn’t sure of what agreements were made between the beta testers and unity =x But I’m excited for 1.1. I keep rolling in my bed in the morning thinking about the potentials lol
On the other hand. I gotta play around with the bones/skinning some more. Sometimes when I set vertexs to 0 for certain skin envelopes it doesn’t get imported correctly.
skinned vertices must be attached to at least 1 bone. if you don’t have them part of the skin and animate the skin it will go bogus