I am working on a game that involves having crates as decoration. Each crate (pictured below) has 19 parts.
The game has 7 of these crates, and I am worried about the part count in general, because I want the game to be heavily optimized.
Should these crates be unioned together, so that they are 1 union instead of 19 parts? I have already disabled collisions and anchored them as to avoid any physics calculations.
Turning the crate into a union will not improve performance because you won’t be changing the number of polygons present in the model.
Instead, if you wish to have several clones of the crate in your game, it would be worth turning the crate into a mesh since meshes are far more optimised than unions. To my knowledge, meshes only need to be downloaded by the client once as soon as they join a game, meaning this will have a lesser impact on performance.
Unions will only make the part one entire CSG block. Sometimes, unions will break and/or the material texture will probably look checkered.
Really, I agree with soupbuilds and import the model as a Mesh or MeshPart. The only reason to use Unions is to use physics properly as one whole part and solid modelling.