Tintifax opened this issue on Jan 16, 2004 ยท 26 posts
maclean posted Sat, 17 January 2004 at 4:23 PM
Tintifax, I mainly make furniture products myself and I can tell you right now that props are nothing but a pain. For the average user, cr2 figures give much more flexibilty and MATs can be used to do just about everything with them. If you're using props, MATs are a pain, expecially in a setup like this where it looks as though the user would probably use multiple instances of an item. That pretty much rules out props/MATs completely. Here's what I would do. Stick with cr2s. 4Mb isn't that bad. But DON'T use morphs to switch off geometry. Split the geometry up into body parts and, if necessary use SET files (a form of MAT) to configure the more complicated ones. Remember that when you make a morph, the more complicated the body part geometry is, the bigger the morph will be. So, try to break the figures down as much as you can. Secondly, take a close look at the original geometry to see if you can lower the poly count anywhere. You may be able to knock it down by a fair bit. Are you saving the obj file without normals? If not, then do it. That'll knock off 20-30% in the size of the obj. It looks like a cool project. My advice would be to spend the time on it and get it right. Even if you have to start from scratch, I reckon it's worth doing really well. mac PS If you want a sample of a SET file to switch body parts on/off or to set morph values, let me know and I'll post it. You can even use them to set joint parameters too.