Is it ok to stick meshes into each other?

Im making a Spacemarine helmet similar to this:


Im wondering about the hoses at the sides of the helmet. Is it acceptable practice to just place the hose at the side of the helmet without wielding its vertices to the helmet, which would create some overlap, or do vertices allways need to be connected?

I think I have read once that it could create rendering problems, but it shoul be ok as long as you aren’t exporting for use in a game.

In general, yes.

There are some situations where it’s not a good idea. Once you start doing some animation, doing this can lead to textures appearing to swim through the mesh, but not for an object like this that ought to be considered as a single piece (as long as you don’t add physics to the tubes or something crazy like that). And certain styles of rendering-- AO bakes, edge line-- won’t work right with overlapping meshes.

And games are fine with overlapping mesh objects, but they tend to use either single manifold meshes (reduced vert count, better baked normals) or unsorted alpha planes, so that’s why you’re not going to see it there. There used to be some issues with z-fighting when this happened, but I don’t think it happens any more.

Overlap meshes until it you see a rendering problem. When you see a rendering problem, ask yourself, “Could this be due to overlapping meshes?” Then if it is, fix it. Don’t fix it until it’s actually broken.

Ok, thats exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you very much bandages.

Sound advice. If you look at a lot of models, especially hard surface, you’ll find that sort of thing all the time. Not as likely on organic models and things requiring deformation etc.

Thank you colkai.