children count as seperate entity?

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/children count as seperate entity?

(tu) sinu (Posted 2003) [#1]

if i made a model and it had 100+ seperate children, would it be bad for performance or bad in general?

Mustang (Posted 2003) [#2]

Usually every part of a hierarchial model is a separate thing with separate surfaces and I think it's the same in Blitz3D too. Case 1: 100 aliens, evry alien is boned single mesh. All use exactly the same material (textures etc) = 100 surfaces and objects. Case 2: Spacecraft model, with one main part (hull) and LOTS of small moving bits like ailerons, laserguns, bombs etc. Total number of objects is 100 (1 hull + 99 "other parts"). All use exactly the same material (textures etc) = 100 surfaces and objects. This is how it would go, I think... IMO your case (2) would be exactly the same as Case 1. Is it bad? It depends how heavy the scene is otherwise and what kind of textures etc you have, but IF you can, reducing the number of childrens would be good.

podperson (Posted 2003) [#3]

Actually I'd bet that 100 boned single meshes would be a FAR worse case than a spaceship with 100 rigid child parts, since -- unless the former is implemented with DX8+ vertex shaders (which it isn't yet), each boned mesh has a bunch of children.

Mustang (Posted 2003) [#4]

I was talking about surfacewise here mostly... but yes, deforming (boned) mesh is of course heavier operation than transforming hierarchial child meshes.