I need y’all opinion on something. I’m trying to figure out what is better when it comes to mesh optimization with large projects. This is a small example:
This is a palm tree I made. It has a trunk and 9 leaf Meshparts (all 9 leaves use the same MeshId) Would it be better to merge all these leaves in blender and just make it so the palm tree consists of TWO Meshparts, the trunk and the leaves?
For my project, there might be 500+ Palm Trees (At most, probably 100 rendered at once due to StreamingEnabled) So I assume it would be better to reduce 5,000 parts to only 1,000 parts, right? But if the leaves are merged together, it would have more tris? I’m at a dilemma on which is the lesser evil!
I’m aware of collision fidelity and other things, I just need thoughts on part count vs. mesh tris specifically.
If the leaves need to move every frame using a script, it is better for it to be a one mesh, but if not then don’t worry about it.
I don’t think it’s gonna change too much when you merge it.
I mean, it would probably have a low impact on CPU during render, as there are more parts to check if they are visible to the camera but the impact is very low. So as i said, i don’t think it’s gonna have a visible performance hit.
I am not a expert tho and i might be wrong.
One tip i have for you, if the leaves have CanCollide set to false it is also best to set CollisionFidelity to Box, as if it has other CollisionsFidelity it will just waste memory generation collision mesh.
Roblox does batching automatically which renders meshes with similar properties together at once, but it would probably be better for memory to merge them.
The amount of tris per leaf could be reduced by a lot if you baked it onto a plane (with OpacityMaps in Substance Painter. Greyscale the textures your current leaves use them in the software. That said, I don’t know if you have Substance lol) and tweaked the shape to fit what it looked like before - it’s better if you look into it. Just avoid clipping and use SurfaceAppearance. It works even if the meshes are joined together.
