What is the most performant way to import flat PBR textures?

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#1

I have this flat texture that I just created in blender and uploaded to studio:

Grating Texture
Grating Texture1484×607 116 KB

I’m happy with how it looks, but the texture was based off of a plane in blender which means there is only one UV island. Scaling the thickness of the MeshPart makes it clear that there are data for all 6 sides, not just the singular face:

PBR go brrr
PBR go brrr809×552 48.1 KB

If I scale the MeshPart’s thickness to its smallest amount, does the engine still draw the other sides but overwrites it? In other words, in regards to rendering the image, does it have 0 performance benefits for scaling the MeshPart all the way small? Does the engine disregard most of the lines of the maps or does it draw every pixel but overwrites it for the same location when the MeshPart is scaled down?

I obviously don’t want 6x the amount of PBR textures in my game; Unfortunately, PBR is only supported by SurfaceAppearance, otherwise I would just plug the maps into a texture/decal and call it a day.

If it is drawing 6x the amount of PBR textures when the thickness is scaled all the way down, then the only workaround I can think of is to instead use a cube and maybe move all but one of the UV islands to an area outside of the textures or to an area of alpha. This causes the need to upload an .fbx file of a cube just to get the UV data…not really ideal.

So should I just scale the thickness of the MeshPart and ignore how it is double-sided, make the game download an extra mesh object for each PBR texture, or maybe something else?

#2

Unfortunately, PBR is only supported by SurfaceAppearance, otherwise I would just plug the maps into a texture/decal and call it a day.

You can make a material out of it.

But anyway, I can’t give you an exact engine based answer, but you really shouldn’t worry about the number of times a pbr material or surface appearance is drawn, but rather how many of them have to be loaded into memory. No matter the amount of objects, this is 1 time.

What you should do here is just ignore it, and if you want a plane, upload a plane mesh and reuse that same one anytime you need a plane.