These past few weeks, we’ve been working on having cool ruins to replace the buildings when they are destroyed.
This was not easy. In the first place, we don’t want to have stupid amounts of geometry going directly to your video card. In order to maintain the low poly look, we have to be resourceful in how we show the destruction.
While doing this we had to resort to nested prefabs (which we will cover next week. Spoilers!), deal with a lot of trouble we had with the .FBX and with the project order in almost every fracking level of it.
Well, here is the thing:
First, we had these nice little buildings, each one in its own file.
That was cool, except for the fact that when we decided to add the ruins, some of the buildings shared the destroyed version. So, duplicating the ruins in each file would have added useless geometry, and not doing it would have been messy (and my little OCD bug would have killed me).
We didn’t have an satisfactory way of doing it. So we decided to put the meshes in a few .FBXs. Doing this would mean less file access, and putting the same ruins to share models would save us a lot of polys. And everything would be tidy.
In our organized wall society, we do not tolerate new ideas.
So we ended up with only two or three files in this fashion, using only two or three textures per file. I think it is pretty optimized, but not perfect. I really wanted to optimize everything. I… have… to optimize… more…
I’m implementing all the solutions in the city of Delphi and when everything is working, I will do the same on the other cities.
As almost every modeler using Unity knows, I have to work with both the modelling tool and Unity to really know how it’s going to look. So, here is how it looks in Unity!
(Click to enlarge!)
Well, next week we will talk about a really bummer, which is… NESTED PREFABS!
