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do you combine mesh

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hongkong
In other well known platforms like Unity, people combine mesh to improve performance. In FSX P3D, can mesh combining improve performance too? Can it reduce draw calls?
 

arno

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Do you mean the mesh of a 3d object? Mesh is often used as term for elevation data as well, but I don't think you mean that.

I don't think combining mesh for objects helps a lot, as xtomdl already optimized on export.
 

hairyspin

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A long time ago I had a VC model in MS Combat Flight Simulator 3 which had started to bog down and found combining the mesh of all the screwheads and other small non-animated parts to a single object helped quite a bit. Just watch with FSX you don't overstep the texture vertex limit.
 
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ca-ontario
In my experience, combining mesh doesn't help much... except probably during loading, but that would be just a few nanoseconds, and happens only once per flight....

I think today's graphics cards are so well optimized to handle vertices that their pipeline does not even distinguish between attached or disjointed vertex groups.

I do try not to have redundant vertices ( I weld coincident vertices wherever possible ) except in a few instances where smoothing grouping proves stubborn and doesn't give me the "look" I'm after. That's where I detach polys into a separate mesh "element" which results in a number of duplicated vertices.
 
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us-arizona
When we export a model to MDL format for the simulator, the exporter combines parts that are the same materials. All the work we did to keep parts separate is welded anyways in the export process. Also the parts are triangulated, losing their quad layouts.

When you reverse engineer/open your model after exporting to MDL format, its unrecognizeable... 8-0

I found out later in my days that combining various parts into one mega part made sense and I started doing that. Sometimes I map the parts before I combine them. Then its easier to animate them, etc. One big happy part.....
 
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