United3dArtists Archive

This is just a general question.

I have been making models for a while and never really thought until now, what is better Grouping (Gluing) or using the union tool to make the group into a single mesh.

I guess for some things it is better, say gluing allows you to edit more freely the hierarchy of a group of objects later, like changing the color of an item in the hierarchy.

And the Union tool will shrink down the overall polygon/vertices count and reduce the number of objects in you scene editor.

So I guess it would be a case by case basis. My thought is that if I never intend on altering the group of objects, then use the Union Tool. This will reduce your model size I assume.

If you do intend to alter a group of objects further, then maybe it is best to leave them as a group.

Currently, I do not apply the Union Tool at all, so I end up with a lot of grouped items that probably could be unioned.

Any other thoughts out there on your process of managing your scenes?

I use the union tool often - not the boolean, but the union one.. I think. I then later select by "expand to adjacent" in the WS to cut it away if I want to edit it or change it when needed. The LE gets really bogged down sometimes - and having a large highpoly object instead of many many may low poly ones sometimes bogs the software down (calculate each shader/uv/attributes/history/modifiers over many times)

But I keep things unglued while building. Also I find it much easier to export when things are glued together with union. hierarchies usually don't export well for me. In the software I import to, I separate the islands and UV clusters manually.

Yes, what I mean by Union tool is the Booleans one.

So I leave them separate....but I feel I could do better by efficiency in the model by Unioning them into one mesh.

You could use the Polyhcombine plugin by Clinton for two case; one of which could be the solution of your issue named "Keyframe or Scene Editor plugin?" topic in tS 6.6 forum.

If you use "polyhcombine" on the glued objects, a new single mesh named "Polyhcombine" is created and the original objects can be deleted. Such new mesh is still editable as long as the "Decompose into object" tool is used together with the "Split hierarchy into polyhedra and IK linked branches". Not only, but if you rename the main "polycombined" mesh, to say, "myobject", the forementioned operation will split the hierarchy of the glued objects in "mass renamed" way of "myobject,1", myobject,2" etc., and this could be a reply to your "renaming issue".

You could use the ws union tool and the "keep history" option to join objects without any boolean operations while still keeping the original objects intact. I prefer doing this and works identically to that plug in. It's great to for simplifying objects and processing speed.

Oops! My fault. Still I'm in "tS 6.6 mode" which doesn't has such an option.