is it stupidity to use unity terrain in mobile projects?? risks..etc

Question

i am working in mobile company. artists really like terrain features (painting / mixing textures) etc.. we (in art team) are familiar with some techy concepts. i can imagine, if i paint lot of trees / grass, it will slow down, even when we assure, we won't use such features. they (developers) simply telling us that regular terrain with 5 textures on paint is also not acceptable on latest mobile devices. its so heavy (draw calls) that its going to create pain at end. just wanted to know 1- any one using unity terrain features for mobile development 2- for simple terrain ( with 5 textures of 512K with normals maps) is it going to work. 3- what is average drawcalls for mobile game limits?

huge thanks in advance for your time and suggestions and willingness to share knowledge

Answer 1

Answer by Owen-Reynolds · May 15, 2013 at 12:47 PM

You'll see some 2 year-old stuff about never using terrain on mobile -- that was 2 years ago. They've gotten better fast. iPads can run terrain fine (but don't go nuts.)

I'm currently using a 5-texture (so two-pass) terrain with light amounts of Unity grass on an iPad 3. No normal maps. Base map (the part where it blurs out) is set far enough that it looks OK. Grass detail dist is set kind of close (can't see from overhead view,) but you can see plenty of grass from 1st person view. Framerate is fine, looks good. Can display an overhead 200x200 with detail. A similar scene has a few Unity trees waving around in the breeze (windZone.)

Still iPad 3, was able to roll around an 80K tri (!!!) model (no terrain) and it was fine. Lagged pretty bad once it got up to 250K tris.

Add comment · Share

Answer 2

Answer by ahaykal · May 15, 2013 at 01:30 PM

It isn't stupidity, but if it was me and I'm looking for the best performance I wouldn't use the built-in terrains. What I did was use a plugin called Terrain For Mobile T4M. Performance-wise it's great.I then used a free tree plugin called treeCreatorTutorial w$$anonymous$$ch generates any tree I want. All the luck!

Add comment · Show 2 · Share

whydoidoit · May 15, 2013 at 01:32 PM 0

Share

And while endorsing @ahaykal's advice I would also recommend buying and running Cruncher on the terrains created by T4M, that can have a massive boost in terms of reduced vertices and triangles.

lalamax3d · May 16, 2013 at 06:31 AM 0

Share

thanks, it really helps. we purchased T4M yesterday, seems better. actually good thing is, it can import stuff from unity terrain. thanks again..

is it stupidity to use unity terrain in mobile projects?? risks..etc

2 Replies

Your answer

Welcome to Unity Answers

Follow this Question

Related Questions