Grouping or Boolean Union???
 

Hey everybody.....happy new year.
I got that "Learning Maya" book everyone is on about and its *very* good indeed. I feel as though I'm learning a lot. I do have one question though....

Basically I want to learn Maya to create characters for my videogame. Now, in the Instant Maya tut on character animation, the character is all one mesh, so I'm thinking I need to use the Boolean->Union tool.

To texture a character, it would seem better to have the model split into parts and then texture each part and use the grouping functionality instead.

I guess my question is, do I need to have one large mesh for boning and character animation, or do I just use group (which would seem better for texturing parts of the model)?

Thanks for any help!!!

Rage_Matrix

"I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer. Be gentle with me."

I believe you can do it both ways. But since you're using the character for a vid game I believe it's safer to make it just one mesh...

Well, the character itself is only going to be a series of pre-rendered bitmaps.....not the actual model itself as I'm not doing 3D at the moment. Sorry, should have made that clear :)

With this being the case, should I go with the grouping method or is a single mesh still the way to go? Also, what pitfalls in regards to texturing should I be aware of if using a single mesh?

Rage_Matrix

anyone? :)

For games it's better to use one mesh......simply put most people don't have computers that can handle the graphics of a complicated model......so they keep it simple to keep framerates up.

I am sure when computer hardware becomes amazing and for a decent price....you will see Final Fantasy type games.....or better.....:beer: :beer:

If you're using pre-rendered bitmaps, then it does not matter how you set up your character. Bottom line is what the character looks like. If it looks good as a single mesh, make it a single mesh. If it looks good as a segmented model, make it a segmented model.

The main difficulty in texturing a single mesh character is laying out all of the UVs in a manner that minimizes distortion and hides any seams that you may have (assuming you're working with polys).

It's not necessarily better to use a single mesh for game characters. It really depends on the game engine and the type of character you're working with. For instance, say you have a character with a lot of armor pieces (like a knight) -- it's easier and makes more sense to leave it as a segmented model. On the flip side, a character wearing skin-tight clothing would work best as a single mesh model. Neither one will necessarily run faster than the other. It all depends on poly count of the models. Higher poly counts tend to slow things down some more.

OK, enough game dev talk...