Originally posted by LtNarol:
wouldnt gluing (not sure if thats what you meant by booleans) them together solve a lot of these problems? As for the engines, i can always go back and overlap the polys at the engines.
Nope.... well, there are 2 things;
1 - with overlapping subobjects, the model can work, but the engine doesn't know which object to render first - so you get a nasty triangular clipping effect - you can often see this at the base of turrets intersecting with the hull.
2- with gluing, you creat a lot of 'holes' in the model, not apparent until you are running in the engine. Basically, you have 2 faces intersecting; i.e with a big face(2)and a smaller face(1) glued together;
--------
|2 |
| --- |
| |1 | |
| --- |
| |
--------
(as if 2 cubes were glued). Now, face 2 won't render, as there is no connection between it and the (intersecting) face 1.
It's hard to explain, but to fix it you need to create a 'filling in' face between the two;
--------
|\ / |
| --- |
| |1 | |
| --- |
|/ \|
--------
you can do this with triangulating the model, but it
massively increases the polycount in my experience. You can simply leave a tiny gap between the faces, but i find that a bit awkward, as it creates see-through seams.
Personally, I always start from a simple cube and extrude, to try and avoid using any booleans.
(edit - the parsing screwed up - click on 'edit' to see the way the diagram type things should have looked)
[This message has been edited by aldo_14 (edited 02-10-2002).]
