Animated Billboard or Animated Model?

Question

I need to have about 800 animated little figures within view at a time for a sort of puzzle game. I believe I have two options: 1. Use billboarding with animated textures/materials drawn on 800 planes. 2. Use 800 ultra low poly models which use traditional rigged animation.

What will end up being faster?

If I use option 1, I believe it'll end up being a whole lot of Draw calls, but I'm not sure. Not all of the little figures are the same, so there may be a huge load for duplicating/modifying the materials. (I do use tiling of the animation frames on the same texture)

If I use option 2, the number of polygons per rigged model will have to be really small! Like 250 polygons. That isn't a whole lot of detail... but will it be faster?

What do you think? Should I go with animating a billboard or animating a 3d model?

Thanks! Brett

Answer 1

Answer by Bravini · Mar 31, 2011 at 02:13 PM

I haven't tested much about this kind of performance measures, but in my projects I find to be much more costly using lots of animations than many small objects grouped in a gameobject with combineChildren script which can greatly improve speed http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Optimizing%20Graphics%20Performance.html. Depending on what kind of puzzle you want, you could also use particles with billborading with self destruct off.

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DaveA · Mar 31, 2011 at 03:40 PM 0

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Wouldn't combineChildren create a single mesh (or smaller number of meshes), but if they need to all move independently, wouldn't that hamper that movement

Brett 3 · Mar 31, 2011 at 04:31 PM 0

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Thats what I was thinking DaveA. Another question: by 'using lots of animation', do you mean animated 3d models?

Answer 2

Answer by DaveA · Mar 31, 2011 at 03:39 PM

Try both and post your results here please

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Brett 3 · Mar 31, 2011 at 03:43 PM 0

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That is exactly why I posted the question... However, if I do end up having an extra month to do both, I'll let you know.

DaveA · Mar 31, 2011 at 04:10 PM 0

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Hope so. You should be able to do a quick test without all the detail (lots of copy/paste should help) and run the profiler to see what the trend is.

Animated Billboard or Animated Model?

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