Instancing objects

[Joe Hansen]

Instancing objects instead of duplicating; does this save on poly-count?  Even though I’m instancing, it still appears to be upping my tris count in statistics (using blender version 4.5).  All my previous blender work has been mainly subsurface modeling where I’m not as worried about poly-count, but, this is an awesome opportunity for me to actually focus on low-poly if ever I was applying to a game company or somethin’.  All that to say, I’m a lil low-poly ignorant 🤪

[Dwayne Savage]

It still adds to the poly count, but it reduces the memory and calculation used in rendering since it only has to process the underlying materials and mesh data once. 

[Martin Bergwerf]

Hi Joe @Joe_Hansen ,

It reduces Memory and makes making changes to the same Object easier.

It doesn’t really reduce Render calculations. The same Object in different places in a Scene receives different light.

[Omar Domenech]

Instancing has saved me dozens of times. I can’t get a render going because my computer is low on memory, no problem, I start to optimize the scene and one of the first go to’s is instancing. When you don’t have intense and heavy scenes, instancing feels like a waste or a gimmick, but just you wait. 

[Joe Hansen]

Thanks so much for the insight!  While instancing isn’t gonna help me lower my poly count; it’s still a habit I’m getting into for objects that are meant to be identical/duplicated.  Thanks again for clearing up my misunderstanding while reenforcing why it’s still a solid habit to get into! 🙂

[Dwayne Savage]

Remember you can do transforms(Move, rotate, and scale) to get variations. In Blender, you can set materials to object level so that the objects can have different materials even though they are using the same mesh data. Object level materials is considered a bad habit for game development. I don’t know why. It seem the same as a texture ID array to me, but I’m very green on the programming side. 

[Author]

Posts