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Throughout my career I've been on many projects that required heavy, heavy optimization to run on target hardware. It's always quite a slog in the moment to try and figure out how to slice 100 batches, or Set Pass Calls but seeing numbers go up and down is so rewarding!
Recently I've been trying to reduce the amount of batches in my scenes and have been atlasing non-static meshes onto a master atlas to reduce the amount of individual materials. This also means I'm tweaking textures that had material parameters into the textures.
The balancing act of "is this still an acceptable resolution?" "Does this object _really_ need a normal map?" "Could we combine these objects and tweak the material parameters a bit?"
Sometimes it's strictly "Lop 15k verts off the top of the scene" but rarely is this the "silver bullet." As the graphics engineer who taught me all of this said "You don't want to be paying your rent with couch change." Optimization has many routes.
Anyways, All this is to say that optimization can be challenging, especially when it comes to dealing with lighting but there are tons of avenues that you can explore and as an artist it only benefits you to know how a single model / texture / material impacts performance.
Thanks for coming to my GREG-Talk, and if you have any questions I can try and answer them! Although I know there will be questions that I will be stumped on! The first step to knowing is to ask!
