Combined meshes or modular meshes? (Mobile game dev)

salimmatta

Concerning mobile game development, is it better to have a ready combined mesh or a modular ones? (ex: Houses)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that modular ones might causes loads of draw calls on mobile platform which will end up in creating performance issues,

What you think guys?

danr

if you're talking about Unity, you can make sure they share a material and use batching

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html

for lightmapping, it's often better to combine meshes so you can get full control over draw calls, but you can still do this editor-side rather than modelling-side and keep the flexibility of your modular pieces

eg https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/simple-mesh-combine-8748

salimmatta

Hey danr,

Actually it was an overall question, because I believe on mobile it is better to have a fully finished and combined mesh instead of modular pieces to build your village, city, etc etc because simply of draw calls, again correct me if I'm wrong

Cheers

HAWK12HT

Both modular and combine can work, depends on your requirements at the end of the day. With Modular you can do fast iterations of environment within Unity or any game engine rather than doing them in DCC program. However for modular approach keep materials and textures shared to lower draw calls.