OK, new question. I am modeling for games and wanted to know if an object can be more than one piece?Like a sword for instance, can the blade and hilt be seperate pieces, not sharing any verts? I know characters have pieces, like the eyes not joined with the body, just parented. So is it OK to model game objects in many different pieces?
Yes, it is OK to have models made of separate pieces, by example vehicles with turrets are not a single monolith mesh, even if the vehicle is a single same object, the turret mesh is separate from the hull mesh and the wheels/tracks are separate from it too.
Similarly to a rifle, while it’s a single object, the magazine cartridge mesh is separate from the rifle body mesh , so it can be removed in animation during a reloading by example.
What’s important for game assets is to avoid having many textures for a single object, even if it is made of several meshes.
Perfect. This is GREAT news. Really cleared that up. THANK YOU so much! About the textures, can’t i just bake all the textures to a map and use that as a single texture on the model? With a bump/normal map?
Yes you can use the baking function to get every separate diffuse maps into a single, same for AO/normals/etc… i often did it myself and it has always worked good.
But of course be prepared to lose a bit of quality, if by example you have 4 1024x1024 textures and bake into a single 1024x1024 one.
Gotcha…Thx again!..very helpful.