OVERVIEW
This is great one. Writing this blog for people to know how they can reduce their FBX file size in the final APK built or IPA built.
So all of us are pretty much aware that developing 3d game could cost your app great amount of assets and finally a huge app size. Big app size means people will not download your game till they have Wifi connection! Which is a big problem in the app industry.
STORY
Getting down to the tip which I used to squeeze my characters in Dragon Kombat game. So our Dragon Kombat game is a 1v1 player arcade game. Which has great models designed in Fuse and Character Creator. All these models are so cool that we just didn’t want to reduce their polygon count. But at the same time have many devices run them at good fps. So firstly I am talking about RAM consumption, when we tested our models on devices they were all near around 20 mb each. And when played the game they occupied good amount of RAM. Our game ultimately started lagging. But then we also saw that our main APK size was huge too. Near around 250-300 MB. So ultimately we checked the Editor Log and found out the culprits. Sure textures were issue but not as much as the Models we used. Then we tried to use Mesh Compression which unity offered in their settings. We found out that size of the models didnt reduce. Only thing reduced was the quality of models in game. Shame!
SOLUTION
Then we played with all the setting in the Model settings. And to our surprise we found only 1 setting which affected the Size of Model. BLEND SHAPES!!
As soon as we turned off importing of Blend Shapes we got astonishing 80% reduce in Models size. I mean this was great. Our game went from being 250MB to under 100 MB!
Then we reduced textures a bit more and came down to 85 MB! Very cool!
But then yeah Blend Shapes are great! One of our character is Dr. SYkoo! Which has this mouth opening animation when he was idle and fighting. So we only decided to keep that model have Blend shapes. So finally we ended up having 10 Fighters of high quality and 1 model among them had Blend Shapes. And Game size went up to 92MB.
CONCLUSION
So in short if you don’t read the whole story! Dont import Blend Shapes if your character doesn’t speak or use expressions at all. Cheers! I will keep updated for more tips as I find more time.
Unity is great because it gives such options! Maybe a little less documented about these things.
Dragon Kombat
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.BlueCreazione.DragonKombat
IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dragon-kombat/id1450303983
Thank u so much it was very helpful