Mask material better for performance?

Development Rendering
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1

Hello I am trying to make a metal fence and I wanted to know what is better in terms of performance.

  1. Use a single flat plane with a ‘fence’ material where the holes in the fence is masked out using an alpha channel.

OR

  1. Actually create the fence using more polys.
2

Hey hey Nken!

Good question.
A buddy of us made this video: Alpha 1 – My Top 5 Usecases | Simon schreibt. in which he goes over a lot of the usages of masked textures, i think it will answer a lot of your questions, or at least guide you in the right direction :slight_smile:

Good luck!

  • the masked Soul.
    (pun intended)
3

Thank you Luos. I had this question because I figured when I am using a shader with alpha channel, the engine would have to do more computations to make the lighting and shadows etc look realistic across the material and the video doesn’t state which method is better but I believe it’s safe to assume I should use the plane with alpha channel because it seems that’s the standard in a lot of modern games.