Export Mesh and Material Granularity

Question

Hello 🙂

I have a sort of a vague question:
- does it make sense to allow a more specific material and mesh granularity options in CE. 
I'm not on a comfortable zone here, as I'm no 3D expert... please bear with me with me. Nevertheless, consider the the pictures attached.

The building has "picking boxes" around each floor. For the purposes of the application we're working on, each picking box mesh must have a unique ID. However, the picking box material is exactly the same. 
The second picture is how the building is imported into Unity3D. It shows different meshes and materials.

The building was exported with "merge by material".

In this specific case, I would like to:
- have only 1 mesh for everything that is *not* a picking box;
- have only 1 material for the picking boxes (less materials, means less "draw calls" on Unity, means better application performance)
- have different meshes for the picking boxes, uniquely identified.

I think this is not possible within CE. Is it?
But I think it makes sense at least to allow to merge everything into one single mesh? However, no such option exists within the exporter.

What do you think about this? All of these things relate to performance issues on game engines.

building.jpg

fbx_meshes_n_materials_CE.png

AndréCardoso · Answer

Yup,

I tend to try to keep "common" rules or operations on a separate file. It becomes handy when you have multiple projects... a "ln -s" does wonders 🙂

But I think you can ignore that. Do you think it is possible to do what I proposed, when exporting to FBX  and importing on Unity? If yes, can you give me a very simple example?
matthiasbuehler;177071

Anonymous User · Answer

Original User: matthiasbuehler

it seems you're working with imports, right ?

AndréCardoso · Answer

Yup, I did work with that. Actually, currently that is my only option to create "identifiers" for each picking box:
...
...
FloorPickingBox(splitTotal, floorIndex) -->
 case floorIndex < splitTotal - 1:
  set(material.opacity, 0.5)
  misc.SetMaterial(FLOOR_PICKING_BOX_NAME + 
    "__" + floorIndex + "__" +
    listItem(FLOOR_PICKING_BOXES_UUIDS, floorIndex))
 else:
  s('1, '2, '1)
  set(material.opacity, 0.5)
  misc.SetMaterial(FLOOR_PICKING_BOX_NAME + 
    "__" + floorIndex + "__" +
    listItem(FLOOR_PICKING_BOXES_UUIDS, floorIndex))
...
...
# misc.cga
SetMaterial(name) -->
 set(material.name, name)
 TerminalMaterial.

I'm calling set(material.name, "name") all the time, to make sure that on the "other side" I can query things...
The "create shape groups" does not do anything that I find relevant. It only organizes the meshes in a hierarchical manner.

But let me tighten the scope of my question:
- given the example in the code above, is there a way to end up with a one single material for all the picking boxes, but meshes with different names (after importing into Unity)?
The way I have been doing it, I get different named meshes And different materials.
matthiasbuehler;176484