[Maya/Unity] Tool for breaking up optimized and UV mapped meshes?
Greetings!
I have been assigned to a VR project that is going to have highly optimized breakable houses, and I'm really having trouble finding a good tool for this. Currently, I'm doing this entirely manually by creating boolean after boolean, and it's the slowest process in the world, plus stray vertices in Maya are extremely stubborn for whatever reason, making it really annoying to clean up the broken pieces.
What I need the tool to do is:
- * Break up an optimized and UV mapped mesh without messing up UVs
- * Delete unnecessary edges and vertices on new pieces and create new ones where necessary (holes for windows, for example)
- * Fill new gaps in mesh, preferably with a new material
All the tools I've found so far either just flat out don't work for these meshes, or they don't optimize the meshes after breaking it up. The latter is less important, but the poly budget is rather strict, so unnecessary stray vertices should be avoided.
Later down the line, we would like this to be more automated in Unity, unless it's better to just prepare the broken pieces in Maya for this particular project, but for now I'm creating a "quick" demo of it.
Replies
The blender explode modifier is pretty good. Not quite sure what Maya has to offer.
I understand that performance is important, but if are really that concerned about performance, your problem lies not with polycounts, but with the fact you decided to use Unity for a project with higher ambitions than that of a card game with a built in "space heater" bonus feature.
Houdini would be the best tool for this. But it'd take a bit of learning.
Nvidia released a free tool a few years ago. It'll be named something like apex destruction or physx lab.
It's basic impossible to navigate their developer site on a phone so I can't find it atm. Worth googling though