noob game mesh question

traden

I've shown this mesh in another thread, but it seems more appropriate to ask the tech questions here.

Currently this mesh is in several pieces, is it a good idea to join the pieces together? I was looking at the dominance war winners and the meshes look like they're all on piece with the odd floating polygons, is this standard practice before rigging etc?

here's the mesh:



thanks!

renderhjs

ever skinned a character?
if you want to rig and skin the character it is usually easier to merge everything. Besides that its also easier to:
- edit UVW so that you can put all uv shells together into 1 layout
- export to the engine- the different objects to export the slower the engine will handle it. Thats also why some engines use face flags or face attributes to distinguish within a mesh between different groups of whatever.

its good practice to model into several pieces and instances but once you export your character at least from my experience it gets merged into 1 anyway.

traden

thanks a lot for the info renderhjs! No, i've never skinned a character.

renderhjs

well it depends on the software , but usually one always skins a whole fluid mesh and not lots of separate objects.
The object position itself often works in the engine as local pivot of the object (it gets shifted in the engine around). And thats why its often just 1 mesh- and not multiple because it would also mean more loops in the engine to run (= slower) and more work for the artist to export and rig each individual piece.

traden

what would you suggest I do with the dangling pieces such as the keg, and the bottle?

I'm going to be using Unity3D with this guy, so I plan on making a lot of canned animations. I'm assuming that it shouldn't be a problem to have some separate assets (like the keg, bottle, pouch).

I'm going to use cheetah 3d for rigging/animation.

thanks for the reply