So I have been optomising the performance of my game by lowering the poly count of my meshes in blender... Obviously... But with the setting to change the faces from flat to smooth, Edges from smooth to sharp, Vertices from smooth to sharp.... You can really get some awesome lighting effects on your objects... But my question is this... Does changing an objects Face/Edge/Verticie to smooth have an impact on the graphics load of a BB3 app? My gut (and a couple of day's testing) says that it should be used sparingly....but any Tec boys in Buildbox? got any advice? Anyone? .....cue the tumbleweed. x
Any time you split a vertex normal you essentially make a copy of a vertex. This is the same thing as making a hard edge instead of a soft edge. The game engine will have to compute two vertices instead of one. Same thing goes for UV texture layouts. Every time you separate a group of faces into its own separate UV island you double the vertices on the border of the island if that border is shared with a different UV island. This is why the rule of thumb is to only have hard edges where you have UV islands. This way you get one for free since they don’t double up twice.