I recently found out that graphics cards prefer one large mesh to many small meshes (I read this on the Unity docs, but it seems to be true for all game engines, so I assume it is also true for blender). In blender, when you create a forest using a particle system and than converting it, it makes each tree a separate mesh. If my trees were low poly enough, would it be cheaper to combine several individual trees into 1 “Chunk” of about 20X20 units, rather than bombarding my graphics card with many individual trees?
Would it be cheaper even if my trees were higher poly (Around 600 tris?) Thanks for any information!
Depends, low poly + 1 big chunk is better in general but if you’re using LOD then 1 big chunk of forests poping in and out is too conspicuous
you can combine low poly builds with high poly builds in the right order the high poly objects shuld be the nearest objects in the scene to your player and the low polys are the farthest. you can fill the rest of your map with images far away in the background
Having used low end PC’s for years I can say that using smaller chunks of mesh, rather than one large mesh was much better for me.
If I understand correctly, (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) Blenders camera will render what is in the cameras frustrum. If it’s one large mesh, then it renders all of it, even if parts of it aren’t in the cameras view, dragging down the FPS.
LOD will also help.
All my crappy games will run on a Pentium P6-100, with a crappy graphics chipset at 30 FPS.
in unity you can run a script that gets the framerate of the PC that the game is played on. If the framerate of that PC falles below a certain number, then objects (trees, rocks, grass) in the distance aren’t drawn. (LOD) Allowing huge terrains to run on low end PC’s.
Unity does that… Hum… I think I can make a work around in blender… Get current frame rate then check if it is under prefured frame rate then if it is set the camera’s render distance down till the frame rate is =to prefered frame rate… I’ll work on this.
But if you did that, wouldn’t everything beyond the cameras clipping not be rendered? In Unity you can still see the terrain in the distance, just the trees, rocks, grass etc aren’t rendered. I’m not much of a game dev, but, Here is an example of the script running in a silly game i made a long time ago in Unity 2.62. The terrain (Island Demo) came bundled with it. so the Unity team gets the credit. this will run on weak PC’s. https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0j08kp882llki5/Treasure%20Hunt%20in%20Paradise.zip?dl=0 W,S,A,D mouse to move.
OK then so objects with in a radius of some length, are spawned the rest are set to invisible. Then if they are in the area around you(deturmed by the frame rate) then they turn visable again. Simple.
Sounds good, that way, people with good gaming PC’s can get good graphics. But I think rather than just turn them not visible, cause as stated above, it would be too conspicuous, In that “Island Demo” it is very noticeable on weak PC’s. maybe replace them with Planes with alpa and color of the tree, or whatever, always facing the camera.
Maybe even use Kupomans LOD with the framerate idea.