A number of questions!

Hi

I have a number of questions here I’ve been saving up for the past few weeks. Just scan it quickly and see if there is anything you could bother yourself with to answer.

Right… here goes:

  1. Is it better to use single mesh objects as far as possible and UV map them rather than a combinement of elements? If both have the same amount of faces but the one has some seperate poly’s (for easier texturing) - is this better?

  2. When I join meshes with different materials (okay, this should propably go the model/texture threads), they are fine together. But when I seperate them they each have a link to all of the materials instead of just there own (make sense)… this means I have to manually delete every unneeded texture from the link and materials section. Is there a way around this?

  3. Does the BGE support Bump-maps? I could’nt get anything right last night. Well, not in GLSL mode… I’m stil a bit confused about what happend… I did’nt really work very systematic.

  4. Is shadow baking possible? Meaning, I want to render/bake the shadows on the ground and map them afterward to help with shadow problems.

  5. Sometimes my character seem to fall through the ground mesh when I’m climbing a hill,… not always, but sometimes. Bad collision detection or is this a setting?

Right, now for the final:

  1. Bullet Holes. I’ve tried to figure out from a FPS example how those were done. A very confusing stretch of time spend :confused:. Is there some scripting involved or am I missing something important? For instance, the room walls get effected but not the crates. So is it a material setting? How do I do them?

LOT of questions. But in any case, thanks for checking this out! :slight_smile:

  1. Is it better to use single mesh objects as far as possible and UV map them rather than a combinement of elements? If both have the same amount of faces but the one has some seperate poly’s (for easier texturing) - is this better?
    I don’t understand…just uv texture the object:p
  1. When I join meshes with different materials (okay, this should propably go the model/texture threads), they are fine together. But when I seperate them they each have a link to all of the materials instead of just there own (make sense)… this means I have to manually delete every unneeded texture from the link and materials section. Is there a way around this?
    I don’t think so, but you can have 15 materials on a object. Or something, so deleting every material that isn’t needed should not be do hard.
  1. Does the BGE support Bump-maps? I could’nt get anything right last night. Well, not in GLSL mode… I’m stil a bit confused about what happend… I did’nt really work very systematic.
    Yeah, like a second texture. GLSL supports that, I haven’t played around with it though. Look at this video, this guy is doing it.
    http://www.vimeo.com/2283158
  1. Is shadow baking possible? Meaning, I want to render/bake the shadows on the ground and map them afterward to help with shadow problems.
    Yeah it is possible, I don’t know how to do it though.
  1. Sometimes my character seem to fall through the ground mesh when I’m climbing a hill,… not always, but sometimes. Bad collision detection or is this a setting?
    The problem is the character bounds and radius of the bound. You have to play around with the settings under the logic tab. To reduce the friction so the character isn’t ice skating around the map. Add a material to the floor, and go into the material tab click DYN or something and decrease increase the friction to what you want it to be.
  1. Bullet Holes. I’ve tried to figure out from a FPS example how those were done. A very confusing stretch of time spend :confused:. Is there some scripting involved or am I missing something important? For instance, the room walls get effected but not the crates. So is it a material setting? How do I do them?
    No FPS experience here, and I’m not that good with logic. But I would think that you have to setup something like. When it touches “material” create object plane. The place is on another layer and is UV textured to look like a bullet hole. I’m not sure at all…

Good luck:)

1) Is it better to use single mesh objects as far as possible and UV map them rather than a combinement of elements? If both have the same amount of faces but the one has some seperate poly’s (for easier texturing) - is this better?

This depends on the circumstances. If you are using smooth shading then you will want to have a joined mesh as otherwise the object’s lighting will have seams. That said by separating objects (or just the vertices’s in an object) you can create smoothing groups. very useful for objects like cars and other mechanical objects.

2) When I join meshes with different materials (okay, this should propably go the model/texture threads), they are fine together. But when I seperate them they each have a link to all of the materials instead of just there own (make sense)… this means I have to manually delete every unneeded texture from the link and materials
section. Is there a way around this?

No, You have to delete manually

3) Does the BGE support Bump-maps? I could'nt get anything right last night. Well, not in GLSL mode... I'm stil a bit confused about what happend.... I did'nt really work very systematic.

The BGE doesn’t support bump maps. It does however have built in support for normal maps which are a far more advanced way of having lighting show more polys than are there. you can even bake your normal maps in blender.

4) Is shadow baking possible? Meaning, I want to render/bake the shadows on the ground and map them afterward to help with shadow problems.

By shadow baking do you mean light maps? if so, yes it is possible and fairly easy to set up.

5) Sometimes my character seem to fall through the ground mesh when I’m climbing a hill,… not always, but sometimes. Bad collision detection or is this a setting?

You are probably using a cube for “dynamic” detection. an object who’s base comes down to a single point (like a diamond) is better for these circumstances. You should also read up on the different methods of movement

6) Bullet Holes. I've tried to figure out from a FPS example how those were done. A very confusing stretch of time spend :confused:. Is there some scripting involved or am I missing something important? For instance, the room walls get effected but not the crates. So is it a material setting? How do I do them?

It’s not a material setting. bullet holes or decals are planes that are attached to the surface of a mesh and rotated to lie flat against the mesh. Currently this is only supported via scripting however there are a number of scripts available. one of the most popular being in Social’s FPS template