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What are the disadvantages to scaling objects?
I create my models in sketchup (yes I know, sketchup is not good for game modeling, blah blah blah) and because sketchup's default unit is one inch vs unity's default unit of 1 meter, I have to scale all of my meshes to a uniform size of 0.0254 on import. This includes some mesh colliders, although all other colliders/non-mesh objects are left unscaled. What are the performance disadvantages (if any) and/or shader issues that happen with scaling?
Only irregular scaling has negative impact. ie, when you scale x y z to different amounts. I believe it forces the creation of more VBOs.
I've read some of the documentation on meshes/materials/shaders and it appears that in previous versions of unity, even uniform scaled objects that weren't 1,1,1 could have negative impacts on performance, but that this has been "improved" in recent versions, especially concerning mesh colliders. However, "improved" isn't the same as saying that there is no performance impact whatsoever, so that is where my question comes in.
It depends on the mesh type too. Skinned meshes with bone animations, where bones have to be scaled, causes some performance loss, or at least historically it did. Remember though, importing a mesh at a scale will resale everything on import, so there should be no runtime issues of the top of my head, unless you scale at runtime.
Well, I don't scale the mesh using the scale factor parameter in the import, should I be doing that? Ins$$anonymous$$d, I'm manually scaling the gameobject that it places in the scene. Also, I don't use skinned meshes for my current game, although that would be helpful to remember for future projects.