Question about common practice

LungFatang

Hi Guys,

I had a question regarding connecting parts to a character model.

I'm fairly new to the game and didn't know if I'd run into problems with rigging if I kept parts separated rather than keeping them connected.

I.E. The head separated from the body but attached as a parent/child.

throttlekitty

Separated is fine, but you'll want the head and body as children to the same group.

Fomori

You generally want to keep parts around deformations (elbows and knees etc.) connected. Anywhere that doesn't really bend/deform is fine though. Hope that makes sense.

LungFatang

Makes perfect sense, thank you.

Mark Dygert

You do need to be careful about topology.

You want to avoid things like this...

sometimes its easier to just join the meshes into one, they might distort a little weird at times but at least they won't totally fall apart.

You also want to avoid excess geometry that sits inside of something else, especially when the topology doesn't match and it could pop out or be difficult to weight, not to mention its a waste of polys.

sprunghunt

Keep in mind that everywhere you split a mesh for any reason you will get a jagged aliased edge.

Now on a very good PC with Anti Aliasing turned up to maximum you won't notice this. But on every other platform (PS3 XBOX 360, iphone etc) you'll get a buzzy hard edge that takes away from the look of the model.

Also geometry that is folded over itself like the collar in mark's second image is generally a waste of polys and can be a overdraw problem.

In an ideal case when you draw a line through your model you only ever want it to hit one forward facing polygon for it to draw fast.

LungFatang

Thank you so much guys, this was very helpful... I will keep this in mind