I’m currently working on assets to use in a city driving/roleplay map I might be making, and I’ve been wanting to create signs for commercial buildings with detailed neon tube displays, by using individual cylinders to outline the shapes of the sign letters or other icons, as you would see in a real-life vintage tube sign.
Although I would love to have this idea implemented on a wide scale for my map, I understand this would likely cause lag due to the amount of parts an individual sign would need to have, especially considering many sign fonts are in cursive and require a hefty amount of parts to accommodate every curve in the text for the neon display. In the image example of the sign I am working on, there are 231 parts in just the second display, which would almost certainly put a huge strain on performance and cause drops in FPS if this amount of detail is used for more than just a few signs.
So I was wondering if there is any way I could possibly optimize this to make it something I could feasibly use throughout my map with minimal lag, or if I should just not use this style and constrict everything to images.
I certainly can tell you used a plug-in to do the words. I don’t know how to help but my only idea is reduce the resolution of the words through the settings in the plugin.
Visible rope constraints between attachments are what I generally use for small details similar to this. Otherwise just making sure CanCollide and CanTouch are toggled off on the parts will help a bit.
Creating a mesh would probably be more effective than using tens to hundreds of individual cylinder parts. It would reduce poly count and overall lower the instance count.
As @Galactiq stated, you could create a single Mesh which you could then turn on and off however you want.
You can select all your neon tube Cylinders, Export them to a .obj file and then Import them into a program like Blender. That would create a mesh of your Parts which you could clean up by joining all the cylinders and getting rid of the ends faces of each cylinder.
Blender is pretty daunting at first, but you learned how to create a beautiful sign in Studio, so there isn’t any reason why you couldn’t do it in Blender.
As @Nasa_155 stated, making CanCollide, CanTouch, and CanQuery false on all the Parts in your game that players won’t interact with helps with performance too.
