Okay so right now I am modeling low poly blades of grass. In order to do this I have been copying and pasting each blade and so on. Until I get a somewhat decent sized field so I can import it into a game engine. The problem with this is that every single blade has its own material. I was wondering if there was anyway to compress every object down into one object that shares the same material. However I have tried to use Ctrl + J but that only connects them but doesnt work since these are not connected.
You can share the same materials by copying them from one object and pasting them to another using the menu seen in the image below.
how do I merge more than one object without connecting them though?
I’m not sure what you mean. I think if you just clicked on two unconnected objects and hit the Join button, they will be one object but not connected. This is a totally different question than your earlier one. Perhaps you aren’t being clear enough on what you’re trying to do?
So if I understand you correctly you are not actually taking about materials, you are really talking about textures or more accurately how to create a texture atlas. I’m guessing you want to use only one material on all your grass blades in order for your game engine to be be able to batch/join/combine and render them all in a single draw call, is that correct?
If that is the case then you can use the Textures Atlas addon to help layout the UV’s then you’ll need to bake the textures to the new UV layout.
materials = shader & texture settings
well they are all one color. So i can just use the same material for all of them. However there are like 70 blades of grass so i wannt know if I can just compresss them all into one.
Yes, It’s called ‘joining’ in Blender and you select the meshes you want to join, making sure you’ve got an active mesh object within the selection then use ctrl+j to join all other selected meshes to that active mesh.
If you are having problems joining the meshes then perhaps you could explain better what you mean by:
Ctrl+J should join the meshes whether they are completely different meshes or just instances of the same mesh.
How are you duplicating meshes? Are you using a particle system?
Are you linking the meshes into the blend file from another blend file?
Really I think you need to be providing an example blend file at this point.
[EDIT]
Hold on! Are you saying each blade of grass has a different material and when you join all 70 meshes you get a single mesh object with 70 materials assigned to it? If that is the case then in object mode just remove the other 69 materials. In future you should assign the same material instance on all your grass blades so that this doesn’t happen.
I know what joining is however if you see from the original post I cannot join them because they are not together. In order to join objects they have to be together or else it wont let me. When I select more than one it just gives me an error and tells me I cannot join them.
\edit\ Never mind I figured it out. I dont really know why but earlier it would not let me join them together with ctrl + J. Thanks for the help everyone! 