I am working on an architectural visualization project and I want to get basic understanding of the following:
When I re-use/repeat the same assets many times across the environment (example re-use of lamp post) does it load them separately when the game loads or does it load only one time since all the repeated assets are derived from one source? Also does it eat up more memory in run-time if I re-use the same asset?
I sometimes have many assets in my library that I do not use in the project. When the project is packaging a build does it also include the unused assets?
If you re-use an asset then it only keeps one of them in memory. However, each copy will increase the draw call count. There’s a way to batch copies together using Static Mesh Blueprint Instances, which will combine them into a single mesh, but that’s at the expense of memory.
And yes, unused assets in the content browser will get packaged into the game. People have been asking for a feature for it to either remove unused assets from the project or to make sure not to package them in the game.