3D game design performance tips
Hi everyone,
Sorry if it`s a newbie question: What is better for performance, use seams or not?
I've discover that I can unwrap without using seams (but it's more laborious), just unwrapping one of the faces separately. I wonder what technic is better for performance
Cheers
Replies
every UV seam is a new set of verts along the seam in the engine (it can also be the case for "hard" smoothing edges and hard vertex color edges etc ) . In older engines and platforms though a small hit on performance it could eat memory... don't think it's such an issue these days but it's worth knowing about.
^^ It's basically irrelevant these days outside of very niche scenarios.
Arguably it's always been a pretty minor consideration. the saving in texture memory you get when when breaking things up nicely for packing and reusing UV space is orders of magnitude more beneficial in memory terms than saving a few duplicated vertices
Seam placement is important in terms of getting decent bakes / lod transitions so prioritise that
Okay thanks a lot! Every little detail sum to the final result :)
Irrelevant for memory, sure. But build an entire game like that and you're choking the renderer for no reason. Having zero coherency in your mesh data is just bad, your vertex shader is doing more work and your pixel shader suffers equally.
James_ross
Im not suggesting you shatter every face off separately, that would be silly.
I'm saying that you prioritise ease of authoring and quality over the cost of a few extra vertices - which is not silly.