koobas.hobune.stream
quad vs plane as terrain
i'm going to use rectangular-shaped terrain in my project, but i'm not going to use unity's terrain 'cause my terrain will be 500x500 units and for unity's terrain i would have to use multiple terrains for this.
terrain would be simply plain, without hills.
so i can't decide what is better for performance: 1 quad or 1 plane with lots of triangles. the camera will see only a small part of terrain at a time, so i'm wondering, what will render better - plane or quad?
A quad has four vertices and two triangles. A plane is like a 10x10 grid of quads joined into a single mesh.
Unless you're going to deform the interior vertices or assign UVs to them for texture-mapping purposes, I can't think of any reason why you'd use a plane over a quad.
i was thinking about culling, but i don't know what is better for performance - 2 huge triangles, or multiple smaller. may be i'm understanding this wrong.
To my knowledge, Unity does not perform partial mesh culling (confirmed in http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/9115/frustum-culling.html) so if any part of your quad mesh is visible, two triangles are processed, while If any part of your plane mesh is visible, all 200 hundred triangles are processed.
I'm not sure but I'd say you would have to have separate quads to use culling. Single plane won't work. Also, if you're using only one poligon, there is no performance impact no matter how big it is ( as long as it is taking the same space on the screen to render )
