FBX size

MikeF

Hey Everyone, i'm currently working on a program that has a lot of high res meshes and my average fbx size is about 10mb, this is a bit of a problem since i'm going to be streaming the content via webplayer. Before i move onto using any kind of compression or asset packs i was wondering if anyone had some ideas about how i could reduce the initial file size. I'm exporting out of maya 2011 with nothing except smoothing groups, normals and smooth mesh checked.

Farfarer

Unity doesn't contain the FBX files themselves, it's all converted to it's own mesh format and stored that way. Which should be a bit smaller than the FBX file.

MikeF

Yeah i gotcha there, but even after compilation i'm noticing a filesize increase of around 6mb per additional mesh, so if i can get that initial .fbx file down in any way it'l certainly help, thanks for the info though!

SlyRipper

As you don't export animations and such, try using .obj the files get way smaller and you can work with them like fbx in unity. fbx is mainly used for animated meshes as they are larger files. If you just use static meshes with it, try .obj instead.

Farfarer

.obj or .fbx doesn't matter - it's the same mesh data inside of Unity regardless of the format Unity gets the data from.

But ensure you're only importing just the information you need in the mesh import settings. Disable animation import if you don't need it, enable mesh compression, disable normals/tangents/uv2 if you're not using them.

If it's that big an issue, you might have to write your own file format and parser. That way you can compress it yourself and load them into Unity meshes at run-time (although that can be slow).