Modular/instanced objects

deolol

Hey guys i switched over from udk and i'm wondering whats the best way to go about importing objects into unity that dont increase performance use with modular pieces. It seems as though the workflow is to simply save a maya file and import that into Unity. However is it possible to avoid unity seeing it as a new object and instead an instance? Thanks

Eric Chadwick

Last big Unity project I worked on, we imported the unique pieces then assembled them in Unity. Programmer wrote a cool tool for laying out our pieces, made it a very fast process. Here's a video of it.
http://ericchadwick.com/img/robot_rising.html#themepalettes

Definitely do-able without a tool, just a bit slower. I found it's helpful if you set your snap settings to be increments of your modular grid.

You could probably get the Maya-layout setup to work, if you made a script in Unity that converted the meshes into instances. But I don't know if Unity would try to keep around all those copies when you make the package file?

deolol

Thanks for replying.

Here is my dilemma. Basically I have the entire layout planned in Maya and the pieces are "modular", but when I import into Unity it's all copies instead of instances. If I were to go the single asset approach, it would mean I can't iterate whilst seeing "the big picture" instead in their own respective maya file. If you get what I mean?

Eric Chadwick

Yeah. The way we handled this was to put every modular piece into one single scene file (we used 3ds Max), let Unity import that automatically, and arrange everything in Unity.