One of the downsides to working alone and self-teaching is that it's incredibly easy to miss things, big and small. What I missed was that there's an inherent limit to the amount of "stuff" that can be rendered at any one time. And that makes sense to me, computer power isn't infinite. What I did was grossly overestimate how much stuff I've actually been making. Take for example the following:
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| Cue the circus music. |
That's the first vehicle, made over one single night. It's not textured or properly shaded yet, but that's ok because it'll be easier to do in Unity. Since I'm all about efficiency, I can take parts from this and use it for the bicycle model I have planned and save a fair amount of time. Looking back, I still maintain these are good ideas in the right direction, but I was slightly wrong because I didn't have enough knowledge. Here's another look at the same unicycle:
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| POLYGONS! |
That's the 3d mesh version, and if you zoom far enough in you can manipulate each individual vertex, line segment, or polygon. This unicycle is made of a little over 32000 vertices making nearly 27000 polygons. To put that in perspective, the models Capcom did for RE5's cutscenes only have about 20000 polys. Of course I only just now looked that number up, but maybe you can see where the problem is. At the time though, I'm still proud about making a pretty nice looking model. Charged by this excitement I wanted to drop it into Unity right away, put some basic movement scripts on it and see how it looked.
It didn't go well. To be honest, it didn't go at all. It took minutes to render, and when it finally did, the fps dropped to about 0.2. This was from only 1 (relatively simple) vehicle and 1 plane (4 vertices and 1 face). If I go through with making this an 8-player simultaneous game, then adding the the level and all the decorations, I can only think about my computer melting because of it. I was disappointed that this great job I did turned out to be not great, but more disappointed that I'd have to go back and redo a lot.
Optimization is mandatory. It's not something I wanted to do at first, but it's necessary and it's given me more ideas on how to streamline things for later. Looking around on Google for a while, I came to realize the following:
* It's not so much about the polygons as it's about the vertices.
* For each mesh, take into account the number of materials and shaders applied, the complexity of the physics applied, and the number of attached scripts. Each of these gets refreshed on each redraw for each frame and can tank performance.
* Redundancy is a bitch. If an asset (a tire, a seat) can be reused more than once, save it to a separate file and rebuild the object(s) in Unity later.
* Baking is something I need to learn. Yes, I'm well aware of the irony.
* A sense of scale is important. There's no sense in making ridiculously detailed models if it's too small to be seen. Those tire treads above? 23k vertices and they wont hardly be seen by the time you scale the model down to fit in the level.
* Similarly, there's no reason to render things that can't be seen. Any "invisible" polygons are just wasting time and power.
Baking (as mentioned above)... I don't know hardly anything about this. From what I gather, you can break meshes down into flat files to make thing render easier later, or something? I'm supposed to use it on high-res models to apply to a low-poly model to make it look really high-res, but Blender doesn't make it easy to figure out.
All of this leads to me cleaning up my models, redoing a few of them yet again, and trying to build them "differently". As mentioned above, redundancy can be worked around but you have to have each piece separate from the whole. With the Unicycle above, almost all of it can be reused for the bicycle later, so the Seat, Pedals and Assembly, Wheel, Spokes and Metal Rim, and Y-Frame have to be separated to be imported later. Once I get to Unity, I can import each individual object, put the pieces together and save the schematic as a Unicycle GameObject. After I finish making the bicycle frame in Blender, I can add that too, use the other imported parts, and make a bike with only one new asset. It's a bit disjointed to think about, but if it's going to make things run better than I'm all for it. Here's a preview:
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| Look at all of those vivid colours. |
It still has a long way to go, but it's going alright so far. You can see the reused Unicycle assets here, but it's the "unoptimized" assets. Since making that bike, I've cleaned up the Unicycle a bit. I've reduced the vertices from 32k to just under 5k just by cleaning up unnecessary things. Rebuilding the bike wont take much time, and the only new asset to clean up will be the bike-frame and I'm not even done making that.
After the bike, I'm working on the next vehicle. I'm making a pogo stick.
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