Unit settings for a tiny world

Hi all,

I’m working on a game about ants - so clearly the size of the world in meters is pretty small (less than two meters in X and Y dimensions). Out of habit I have been dealing with the ants as if they were 1-2 meters in length, keeping everything consistent (and working on the default basis that 1uu == 1cm).

But now I am starting to worry that from a rendering perspective this is the wrong thing to do. Many objects exist that are huge compared to the ants (take the leaf of a plant for example). With my approach, its shadow will probably be sharper than it should be, and I’ve been having trouble finding a good SSS setting.

I would like to treat 1uu as 0.01cm. So, should I resize all my objects and assets down to their “real” scale (which I would rather avoid, since this will be tiny and I fear won’t work well with viewport navigation); or what settings can I tune in order to achieve the best effects with the objects in their current scale?

I’m aware of the following two settings:

  • ‘World to Meters’ in the VR section of World Settings: I think this only affects VR though, and I’ve noticed no discernible change to the appearance of anything.
    -’ Static Lighting Level Scale’ in the Lightmass settings: my gut is telling me that this should be set to 0.01. But the tooltip clearly states that values lower than 1 increase build times greatly, and an attempt has show this to be true.

Looking forward to hearing a some good ideas.

Thanks for reading.