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Is Terrain Optimized?
Hi
Is the Terrain in Unity specially optimized compared to an ordinary mesh of the same size and detail? Following on from that, if I flattened an area of the terrain and imported a mesh of a mountain to sit on that flattened area, would I be incurring any extra overhead.
I'm assuming that where there are perfectly flat areas of terrain, Unity uses the minimum amount of tris to cover it, rather than a fixed resolution of tris all over... is this correct?
Thanks
Steve
Answer by Eric5h5 · Jun 30, 2010 at 07:35 AM
Unity uses heightmaps with LOD for the terrain, so areas that have less detail and/or are farther away from the camera use fewer polygons. If you turn on wireframe rendering in the editor and zoom in and out of a terrain, you can see exactly what's being rendered.
Thanks. So the maximum LOD possible equates to the setting of Heightmap Resolution. So I'm guessing if my imported mesh terrain-add-ons are of equivalent detail, then close-up there's no performance hit, but farther away there'll be a penalty because the mesh doesn't have a reduced LOD equivalent?
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