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Can you have medium-high poly trees in Unity?
I am making trees for a asset store pack and wanted to know what is the limit of tris for large trees.
For the smaller trees I have around 1k to 2k tris.
I'm now working on larger canopy trees and have predicted that after adding all the leaf planes the tree is going to be about 10k tris. I know that is a lot but it is a very high quality tree. The trunk and branches comes to about 3500 tris. Each branch-leaf plane comes to about 50 tris. I wanted the leaves to be as 3dimensional as possible.
It is a very big tree so there won't be a lot in one scene. Also am going to make LOD models for it.
So in short would people be able to use trees with 10k to 15k tris in their Unity game?
Answer by YoungDeveloper · Aug 18, 2013 at 05:15 PM
10-15k per tree is too much for any kind of platform. You should use normal and specular maps more, instead of increasing poly count. Imagine using your trees for forest, let's say 50 trees in scene, that will be about 500k just for the trees, and that is just too much, at least i think so. Have a look at how much professional game designers use for their trees, like Skyrim, you will be surprised at how low they actually are.
But it depends on many aspects, if that tree will be the only one in the viewport, it can even be 50k or more, like in a desert or something.
It's not the bark that's causing the high tri count it's the leaves. I just don't want completely flat leaves. Lowered the tri count on the leaves a little. Another thing is using the ambient occlusion shaders which don't use normal maps.
Thanks for answering. I won't make them that high poly.
Worked on the tree and got it down to 3000 tris. Looks just as good.