DeleD Community Edition

AWM Mars · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 12:58 am Post subject: Unite or Merge?

This maybe a silly question, but here goes.

Is there a difference between Merging objects and Uniting them?

One I see is under the CSG box and the other in the more detailed box. I am kind of hoping, Unite will transform a collection of prims/meshes etc, into a 'skin' model, reducing the vertices etc, and lightmaps. At the moment, when I create a lightmap render, it produces as many as 400+ individual lightmap files. Its not the overall mb size of the files, thats quite small, its the sheer number. When I export the meshes into a rendering platform for use on the web, it takes a long time to decompress all those files.
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trucker2000 · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 1:10 am Post subject:

Unite simply connects the 2 objects. Kind of like grouping them. Merge, actually merges them into one object.
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Mr.Fletcher · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 11:29 am Post subject:

Merges takes the polygons of both objects without altering them and creates one object out of them.
Unite will actually calculate the union of both objects, so if the two overlap, the part which would be inside the other object would be removed.

http://delgine.com/wiki/index.php/Constructive_Solid_Geometry#Union
http://delgine.com/wiki/index.php/Merge#Merge

//edit
if the objects dont intersect, there is no difference between merge and union.
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AWM Mars · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 6:39 pm Post subject:

Excellent, thanks for the replies.. so Unite will lessen the edges, vertices and polygons of a model... and hopefully, the lightmaps?
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Paul-Jan · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 6:44 pm Post subject:

If you need less lightmap data, why don't you just lower the min/max resolution? A good trick is lowering the min resolution only, this can result in much lightmaps without loosing quality in places that are highly visible.

chronozphere · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 7:06 pm Post subject:

AWM Mars · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 3:19 am Post subject:

I couldn't work out what is the best combination, small overall size, followed by larger max (matching the overall size). I did get some results using 8x8 smaller mapping. Downside, I can end up with hundreds (I've had over 700) small lightmaps, totalling around a small 4-7mb.

What I was hoping for, bigger lightmaps, with more infor inside, meaning less of them. As long as I don't trade that for say 6No 10mb files lol.
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Paul-Jan · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 8:38 am Post subject:

You need to set
(1)- lightmap size to 512x512
(2)- individual min size to 8x8
(3)- individual max size to 128x128

and work from there. Never touch (1) unless you know what you are doing, just vary (2) and (3).

(1) doesn't affect total lightmap size (only in a bad bad way when you make it really too small so the 2D packing goes horribly wrong).

This really needs to be documented, but we've been planning to get rid of (2) and (3) for ages.