Hi
Im going to start building outdoor assets for my mobile game soon. But im not sure how to proceed, ive read what i interpret as
conflicting information. On one side ive heard to keep poly count down by using transparent textures for leaves in trees
for example or for wires and stuff that would otherwise be gemoetry heavy. But on the other hand ive read to avoid
transluscent materials in mobile platforms. Im not sure what exactly translucent materials mean tbh. So the classic
2 crossing faces with a picture of a bush on them that has tranparency in the backround. Is that the kind of translucency
to avoid using to much of. Or have i missunderstood, im confused
If you have a lot of polygon that are 35% invisible and clustered up to create a tree, that means that a lot of the pixels of your screen will have to got “through” multiple layers of leaves until they hit a part of the tree that is not translucent.
This results in very high shading costs.
Thats why cutting away as much of the invisible part of the leaves as possible is good for the performance, at least on PC where the extra geometry is no big problem. The only way to do both, reduce Shading costs AND reduce poly count would be to use a solid, stylised object instead of leaf planes with alphas.
If you don´t want to use a stylised object, then I would recomment to spent a few more polys to cut away as much of the invisible part of your leaf planes as possible.
Check out http://www.speedtree.com/ they have optimzed vegetation for mobile platforms…
Thank you!