It depends a lot on the quantity you want in your scene - either works.

Typically, when building a scene, I aim for between 1 million and 2 million polygons. Higher/lower is fine too. It's very hard to give a "This is the answer" because performance can come down to a lot of factors. If you use things like LODGroups, then higher poly objects have basically no impact until you get up close; but even if you don't - it depends on how many you're spawning. Typically, the cost of drawing a single object is about equivalent to 4K triangles - so the cost difference between 300 and 3000 isn't tremendously high (the drawcall overhead is higher); batching will reduce that overhead however.

If you setup LODGroups - use both. If you don't - I'd favour the higher poly variant personally.

 

Thanks Adam, and for the link. That helps a lot, even if not a definitive answer. It sounds like a large part of optimization will happen in Unity itself (so long as my build is reasonable). Coming from both SL and OS, the "limited resources" were prims and then polys. Here those don't seem to be an issue unless I go nuts with the poly count. So the more I want to stuff into one region, the more I should look at the optimization tools.

 

Yep - you really can go a long way before you really need to start worrying about optimisation; but when do you get there, you do have a few tools to play with.

Some like LOD Groups you want to be working with sooner than later (since retrofitting existing content can be more difficult), but others like Occlusion Culling can be slapped on at the end.

 

One other question - I have a Opensim terrain that I'd like to duplicate in my Space space. Is there one best way to do that? I've tried importing a raw file and that isn't working so well. I've a height map, and have also converted that to a terrain.dae in Blender. I have the fbx import working with Blender/Unity, and the terrain looks good but is till a .dae. I've seen some instructions regarding scripts or plugins for converstion - what is best (if any) to use with the Space projects? Or can I just add collision to the .dae? (Sorry, don't see a toolbox or info for a .dae, only for a plane)

I do see, under Add Component (to the .dae), the Box Collider, Mesh Collider, Terrain Collider. Reading up on those, too - which one for this, if any?

The one thing I'd rather not do is start over with sculpting the terrain. At least not until I have at least one region open

The script I'm looking at is Object2Terrain

 

You can use a Mesh Collider. The best method would /probably/ be to import the .raw into Unity's own Terrain - you will need to convert it from SL's silly raw format into a proper R16 or R32 raw; that might be a bit more difficult - I have vague memories I added a 'R32' export option to OpenSim many years ago.

Otherwise, bring in as a DAE (although I would personally strongly recommend using FBX or OBJ over DAE) - and add a mesh collider.

 

Thanks, that helps. Off to do some testing