I am developing a game for mobile off of blueprints and I looked at my stats after adding some trees. My tri sum was around 120,000. Is this too much for one level in mobile? I know it’s not a straight forward question. I’m primarily wondering if the iphone 6 could handle this? How many levels with 50,000 or 100,000 tri sums could one have? Also, is there a way to limit the amount of verts/triangles that the character “sees” at one time in order for the level to be filled with content? For instance, if you had like a sphere of vision where you only see roughly 10,000 tris at a time, but you had 100,000 in the level, but blurred out? Lastly, what is the relationship with vertices, triangles, and polygons?
I’ve just started developing with little to none experience and I just don’t want to start making higher poly models when im just wasting my time. Please Help
If you’re seeing performance issues you will want to profile the device/project and see where your main bottleneck is happening. You will also need to keep in mind that mobile does not use dynamic occlusion like the editor does or for PC/Console titles. For this reason, you will want to enable Precomputed Visibility in the World Settings and use the Precomputed Visibility Volume to have it store the location of objects for occlusion. This can help get some of the performance back that would be lost otherwise. You can read a brief snippet about this in the page linked above as well.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of documentation yet for Precomputed Visibility Volumes, but the old documentation from UE3/UDK is still mostly relevant, aside from a few things that have not been brought over to UE4. For reference that page is here: UDK | PrecomputedVisibility
Lastly, what is the relationship with
vertices, triangles, and polygons?
Vertices make up Triangles and the number of vertices is dependent upon how the mesh was setup in your modeling program and if an edge is considered smooth or not. Polygons are any face that can be rendered in the editor. So this means that it must have at least three vertices or more to make a face.
Thank you so much for your answer. Along the lines of cull distance volumes, if i were to place one of these on the camera and all of the tris (from the character) within that volume summed to be 100,000, would i be able to put TWO 300,000 tri houses in my mobile level? As long as those houses were a distance apart and not being rendered at the same time? If this level was run, the entire theoretical level would be 700,000 tris. This is well over 500,000 tris for a level, but not all are being called to work at once. So my question is, could this scenario be pulled off mobily on an I-pad Air 2 per-say.
Theoretically, yes, but I’ve not personally tried this with any mobile device. I would also strongly suggest not having a couple of assets that are that high poly as well, or it it would even work. Having the house broken into logical pieces and rebuilt inside UE4 is the ideal way to go and to use Precomputed Visibility Volumes to cull is the way to go about development for mobile.
The 500k tris per view is a performance guideline, but not a requirement necessarily as for any device you develop this could be a give or take number. That number has been determined to be a poly count that produces ~30fps for the iPad4 and iPad Air. For other devices that are lower end I would expect lower FPS or other issues to arise.
If you have access to iPad Air 2 give it a shot and see what you’re getting with performance. I don’t have direct access to one at the moment and even if I were to put together a test scene there are likely many differences that wouldn’t necessarily fit your setup.
