Optimize Geometry, Textures, Materials, and Shaders to Create Vivid Mobile Experiences
For Artists
As an artist, you want to achieve visually appealing games with high quality models and scenes. At the same time, you need a good frame-rate performance to support these high-quality graphics and ensure longer, smoother gaming experiences.
There are a range of asset optimizations in the Unity platform that improve performance, and help you get the most out of your game and the Unity platform. These include the following tips:
Disable read or write for static textures by unchecking the Read or Write Enabled option in the Inspector window if you do not need to dynamically modify a texture.
Combine meshes to reduce draw calls, with the mesh combine script being useful for performance optimizations. However, this depends on the makeup of your scene, so experiment to get the correct size.
Do not import animations data on FBX mesh models unnecessarily, as, by default, Unity creates animation data when importing an FBX mesh. This process increases the size of the imported object, so if your object is not animated then it does not need this data. In Import Settings > Rag, and select None for Animation Type so Unity does not generate the animation data.
Avoid read or write meshes, as, by default, Unity keeps a second copy of model mesh data in memory to modify while preserving the original. This means that memory use will be lower.
Use profiling to focus your optimizations, as profiling lets you focus your asset optimizations on the places that matter.
For more information on the above and the many different asset optimization opportunities in Unity, visit this documentation on developer.arm.com. You can also watch this on-demand video in the Arm Developer Hub featuring real-world examples of graphics optimizations.
Alongside these asset optimizations, Arm has a range of Artist Best Practice Guides for Unity developers across the following four areas:
Textures, which provides several texture optimizations to help your games run smoother and look better.
Materials and shaders, which covers various material and shader optimizations to help your games run more efficiently and look better.
Geometry, which highlights geometry optimizations for 3D assets to make your game more efficient and help improve the overall gaming performance.
Lighting, which explains how to use lighting in your game efficiently to avoid a negative impact on gaming performance.
