Unity 3d. One complex object vs its parts as separated simple objects. A single ring object vs Simple sectors repeated as a ring.

[kerbiloid]

Unity 3d.

The material is the same, the texture is a solid color.

From the performance point of view,

What's better: a Teapot as a single object, or 3 objects Body, Nose, Handle ?

Face count is the same, so polygon count - probably too.

Vertex count probably a little higher for the separated parts, but on another hand maybe Unity ignores smaller objects shaded by others (I don't know),

Googled for that but they mostly discuss polygon count.
The existing KSP parts implement both cases.

What's better: a single ring object consisting of several similar sectors, or 1 model of a sector repeated N times?

Say, a fairing base with 6 similar radial trusses.

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited September 30, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Shadowmage]

On 9/30/2018 at 2:49 AM, kerbiloid said:

From the performance point of view,

What's better: a Teapot as a single object, or 3 objects Body, Nose, Handle ?

Every additional transform/object adds more overhead for the Unity engine to process.  It is (with very few exceptions) always better to combine meshes whenever they use the same materials.  This overhead can be compounded when doing animations (more transforms to update during the animation), and is most noticeable when doing anything that has to iterate through the transforms in a model  (most rendering routines actually use the cached transform matrices and don't update on every tick/frame unless needed).

On 9/30/2018 at 2:49 AM, kerbiloid said:

What's better: a single ring object consisting of several similar sectors, or 1 model of a sector repeated N times?

A single ring will be better -- but you won't be able to add 'ring shaped colliders' -- you'll still need to break your mesh up to add colliders to it properly (Unity does not support non-convex mesh colliders).

[kerbiloid]

Thank you very much, now I got it!

 

31 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

A single ring will be better -- but you won't be able to add 'ring shaped colliders' -- you'll still need to break your mesh up to add colliders to it properly (Unity does not support non-convex mesh colliders).

Yes, I always combine the ring colliders (with lower polygon count) as a chain of sectors, after numerous attempts to solve this with the convex/not convex.