Hello I am BCbuds. I am currently working on my lobby for my game and on the walls, a little over half way. I want to have a part that comes out a bit and has the name of my game on it. I want the name of the game to be inside the part though, so I am trying to decide if I should union the part with Negate parts and copy the end result union to use it multiple times or export it as a .obj and use it as a mesh. Honestly I have no idea if exporting a union helps on performance at all but I have heard that unions can effect performance. I have heard that meshes are good and using the same one doesn’t affect the game that bad. So really the question is, is a union like a mesh in the way that if you copy a union and use it in a different place, is it the same/better/worse as using a mesh of the union.
One union won’t impact performance in a meaningful way. The only way unions can impact performance in a way that is noticeable is if your union is classified as a physics part. That can happen if your union is unanchored.
If it were me, I wouldn’t bother exporting. Takes too much time for what it’s worth. Just use a negative part and you’ll be fine.
Is that both Unions and Meshpart have what’s called “instancing” (where copying a Union or Meshpart many times is fairly streamlined and doesn’t affect load times as much - think like one tree model being copied 100 times is much better than 100 unique tree models used only once). This applies to both Unions and Meshparts, it’s just that usually Unions are more appropriately known as “really messy Meshparts” because Union calculations tend to be Good Enough (having some redundancies), whereas Meshparts can have no redundancies if you make it that way.
Does that make a huge difference for one Union, though? Of course not. But for 500 unique Unions? Maybe
