koobas.hobune.stream
can/should terrain children be merged to reduce object count?
I am new to Unity and still trying to get a feel for strategy, design decisions etc. I have been happily throwing vegetation (individual plants) around my terrain with a prefab brush tool from the asset store; I have selected the tool option that makes placed objects children of the terrain. So far so good, but now I have hundreds of individual terrain children and I notice that the 3d editor is slowing down some.
So this makes me wonder whether I can somehow merge all these children (a) with each other or (b) with the terrain, to reduce the object count, simplify the Hierarchy view, etc. I no longer care about most of the placed objects as individuals; there are one or two that have audio sources attached, but I thought perhaps I could preserve those as individuals and weld the rest into a super-object. Would that improve performance? or is it more to do with the fact that these are med-to-hi poly vegetation models so I now have lots of polys, which wouldn't be reduced by reparenting the polys to some super-object?
I notice that the Big Thing in terrain design seems to be procedural and Level of Detail (dynamic loading of appropriate rez object with distance) tools, but I am not yet an advanced enough user to understand what those imply. Wondering if I have started my project all wrong by using individual placed vegetation objects (even though they are very attractive), and whether there is some way to "bake" them into something simpler and less demanding now that they are correctly placed.
