Models vs meshes

Rick Stirling · Jan 2005

A few of you know of a little educational project that I'm working on, documenting a lot of my knowledge.

Anyway, after writing a section on geometry, explaining what verts and edges and polys and tris and quads are, I came to part where I'm stuck. Sort of.

You know when we build a single continuous mesh, and then intersect it with other meshes? Like we build a human, then intersect the ammo pouchs, or put on the shoulder pads as a separate object?

What would you call those?

Are they meshes? Is it a model made up of meshes, or a meshes made from models, or a compund mesh? Or just a model with objects? Just looking for a few other folks views.

SouL · Jan 2005

I call them objects.

Daz · Jan 2005

elements?

rooster · Jan 2005

I agree with either of those two

Toomas · Jan 2005

Q3 model is made out of 3 meshes (or more if it has segmented hands, shoulderpads etc.), thats how i take whats what :P
Just couldnt find a better way to say it :S

Rick Stirling · Jan 2005

Objects? Elements?

In max its an element, says so on the tooltip. What about Maya?

Steve Schulze · Jan 2005

Hm. Maya doesn't quite work in the same way as Max (understatment of the year), but I think elements is probably a fairly safe term, even if its not an official one for all the different apps.

Rick Stirling · Jan 2005

In that case - a few other max vs maya terms please - if they are different:

materials - are these still materials, or are they called shaders?
material IDs
smoothing groups

Ta!

MoP · Jan 2005

I think materials are referred to as shaders in maya - Max's Material Editor is analogous to Maya's "HyperShade".
Smoothing Groups in Max are analogous to Maya's soft/hard edges.
Not sure about Material ID's ... never used those in Maya.

I would call a sub-object of a model an "element" ... however only if it was physically part of the model. If it was a separate object, I would call it a mesh.

Marine · Jan 2005

materials are called materials in maya, it's only the editor that's different, you've got multilister and hypershade in place of max's material editor
only thing i can think of that's similar to material id's is quick sets, as i only ever used material id's for selection purposes

kleinluka · Jan 2005

accessoires?

BoBo_the_seal · Jan 2005

As Ive always understood it, they are elements if they are separate from the primary mesh but still exist within the modifiable structure of the original mesh. If they are separate and require a unique modifier then they are objects. Mesh is a general term referring to the complex structure of vertices and edges. Model is a broad term for the mesh as a whole which derives from the process of modeling.

Example: You edit the mesh but rotate the model. You attach all objects in the scene to create a single mesh comprised of elements.

- BoBo

ElysiumGX · Jan 2005

Element sounds more like a essential part of an entity. Like, an edge is an element of a polgon. Max's vocab is confusing. I like to think of seperate objects just as that. Objects, or sub-objects, created from a mesh. And if you're dealing with how the object interacts with the whole model during animation, that could be child or parent object. etc.

Models vs meshes

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