On 03/06/2011 04:47 PM, Alain wrote:

>> This model was exported from ac3d trial version ... as per one of the
>> sslt caveats, the portions that I used sslt on (plastic hoses) I changed
>> those unions to merge to bundle all the smooth triangles together
> 
> When you have an union of triangles, you only need to change "union" to
> "mesh" and you get a nice mesh. It should be faster than the union
> version, and especialy your merge.
> If the triangles are correctly built, there should be no intrusion and
> thus, no need for a merge.
> Some modelers, and ac3d seems to be one of them, export their working
> meshes as unions while they should export as mesh.

well ... that's nice to know. A "vintage" version would have the tubing
covered in a loose weave cloth material, so maybe an improvement would
be to use uv_mapping to wrap a suitable image for that effect.

> The difference between an union and a merge is that the merge suppress
> the internal surfaces. It's also slower in many cases as the individual
> parts are no longer individualy bounded. Each ray that encounter the
> merge's bounding box need to be tested against all the components.

yep already knew that ... glass or otherwise transparent objects would
benefit!

> Nice modeling.

can't take credit for that ... t'was in their object library. I did
however notice some flaws once I started applying textures, so I'm going
to give it a go and see if I can make some improvements.

Hey thanks for setting me straight on being able to make the unions of
triangles as mesh :-)

Jim

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