Hi
a simple question: for the first time I am building an ancient Greek city and I have the following dilema: Classic architecture has a lot of repetitive elements (columns, acroteria, corbels, friezes etc)
I can either design a building and import it whole (like the one in the picture). It is the easiest way
Or import it half made with only one instance of each repetitive element and finish it inside unreal.
I am guessing the second way will result in better performance (for example I will have only one definition for a column instead of forty) but it will take a lot of time to prepare.
What do you guys think? Is it worth the effort to do it the second way?
At a base level all architecture you make is a single item anyway.
Levaraging the engine’s instancing (HISM) can allow for better performance when occluding object(s).
Particularly when the poly count for classic architecture can get in the billion of tris range
Then, the load of the instance tris count is reduced, and merging as many items as you can into a single mesh will result in the best possible performance by limiting the overall number of drawcalls required to render the building out.
Overall, its a delicate give/take that you really need to benchmark and adjust as you go.
Also, as you can see the engine tends to epic(ly) fail at rendering deep normal maps correctly.
Thats mostly due to engine settings and normal map compression so it can be made to look better - but really it will never be as good as actual geometry.
For a game? Who cares. You want performance.
For archviz? Real geometry all the way.
