Save or hurt performance?

[Lord Padriac]

I'm in the process of planning out the pieces for a modular kit I will be building levels for a game from. I've built some test pieces to size very quickly in Max (no uv mapping or poly count optimization) and I like the way it snaps together very quickly and this approach is going to work very well for me. My question comes from the fact that many of the modular pieces do not need - or do not lend themselves - to taking up the entire square of the texturemap. I have plenty of room in many cases to arrange the uvs so that multiple models can utilize the same texture. Do I save or hurt my performance by doing so? I would think I'd save performance but I can't seem to find a clear answer and I really don't want to go through a lot of work only to find out I was wrong and have to redo everything. Any help or thoughts are appreciated.

[Lord Padriac]

Almost two days and 50 views...awesome knowledge in evidence on this board...thanks for the help.

[SoC]

Almost two days and 50 views...awesome knowledge in evidence on this board...thanks for the help.

Yeah well i got 45 views and no comment too. No one said a word. Not even to say THERE IS NO WAY TO DO THAT. o.O

[geodav]

ok you don't need to have square texture but they must be power of 2
eg 256x128 or even 1024x64

[rjmyth]

the reason i didnt read it was because youve got 1 masive paragraph and i was lazy :P. if you split it up a bit youll probably get more reads. those 50 probably opened it and saw that then closed it like i did lol.

but anyhew... it deacreases time on loading performance but it adds a tiny amount of time for the render pass from what i remember... might be the other way around but overall its definately a good idea

also SoC whats ur thread about?? edit: there i helped

edit: oh yeah theres another reason you may not get much help or views... the level design secton of these forums doesnt get as much traffic coming through as programming or help sections

[Myrkr]

to answer the question directly:

you save draw calls which helps CPU performance.

[Crusha K. Rool]

to answer the question directly:

you save draw calls which helps CPU performance.

The Material still needs to be drawn for each StaticMesh separately if it's on different meshes. It's just a matter of having one big one in memory compared to having several small ones in memory.

[rjmyth]

yeah save on ingame performance but slightly increase initial loading times.