I’m working on a game where I’m going for a retro 3D look. Think early entries in the Sega Virtua series, like Virtua Fighter 1:
In other words, a faceted, “flat shaded” look, without texture mapping. With the help of the forums, I was able to figure out how to get Blender to export models with the look I want (with the Edge Split modifier), and I’ve been assigning materials to individual faces within Blender. Everything looks just as I want it.
I’m targeting iOS, so I’m trying to pay attention to draw calls. I noticed that my character model, with 9 different materials, is taking – guess what – 9 draw calls to render. My question is: Is there anything clever I can do to reduce this?
I’ve done some quick tests where I’ve tried assigning all the material slots to the same material, but it still takes 9 draw calls – one for each material slot. If it were possible, it seems an acceptable solution would be to use a single material, and then assign individual colors to the faces via the inspector or in code, but this test makes it seem that won’t work.
What do you guys think? By going for an old school look, have I paradoxically chosen a more expensive rendering style? Should I just bite the bullet and try to achieve a similar look with textures?
Thanks in advance.