Best method to tile 3d platforms

Hello,

I have been becoming extremely confused trying to figure this out.

I am creating a very simple platformer game in which I want the differently sized platforms to be textured with equally sized square tiles.

I use blender to create the platforms and map the uvs,

I have found multiple methods that achieves this task but I am not sure which one is the best/better optimized.

  1. Create a new material for each differently sized platform. Each platform will have 1 material each that is tiled appropriately. I understand that the more materials that are being used, the more ‘draw calls’ are being performed. But with a simple platformer game, would I ever come close to making too many draw calls? I would also have a lot more game objects due to the necessity of applying a material to each object. How many materials/ game objects is considered too many?
  2. Create same-sized faces within blender and apply a 1x1 material to each face. This will increase the amount of vertices I use dramatically. For instance, a 10x10 platform will use ~176 vertices rather than 8 in method 1. Unfortunately, this takes much longer than the first method.
  3. Scale uv faces greater than the texture to tile appropriately Within Blender, grab each face and scale larger than the actual 1x1 texture to cause tiling. For example, scale a 5x5 face five times larger than the 1x1 texture and align appropriately. I fear that this is the best method of them all in terms of game optimization since only a 1x1 material is needed and reduces the number of vertices greatly. This seems miserably slow when I could have many different sized faces and have to go through and scale/position the uv map properly.

I am hoping there is an easier way that I have not discovered but since this is my first game I am creating in unity/blender, I am unaware of how extensive each of these methods are. (Whats considered too many vertices, materials being called, etc.)

Thank you for any sort of help!

If you’re aiming for absolutely perfect tiling, regardless of how the texture lines up with the edge of any given object, you may want to consider projecting textures onto your object (See the section regarding “Tri-planar Texturing”).