I’m creating a real-time canyon for Torque 3D game engine. What I would like to use is one mesh for a canyon; and break up the mesh using clusters, texturing each cluster piece. How do you do that? I can create clusters but I’m not sure how to go ahead and assign a material/image to each one.
Any other thoughts on the best way to bring in a canyon into a game engine? I was thinking about breaking it up into pieces, but I would ideally like it to be one mesh so there isn’t seams.
Thanks!
For your first question, it’s just like texturing objects. Select a cluster and apply a material, texture image, and projection.
For your second question, I admit I’m not very familiar with game engines but I suspect that they might not like multiple materials and textures on a single object. Therefore it’s probably better to bake everything to a single texture image and projection using Render Map before exporting.
Therefore it’s probably better to bake everything to a single texture image and projection using Render Map before exporting.
Ouch. You’d either end up with a huge texture map or huge texture pixels. Baking is simply not feasible for an environment.
break up the mesh using clusters, texturing each cluster piece. How do you do that? I can create clusters but I’m not sure how to go ahead and assign a material/image to each one.
The question i would be asking myself is not how, but rather "can i do that?". Many engines support multiple materials per mesh on export, and these get treated as separate batches during frame render.
However i would check with the torque manual beforehand and do some tests to see if the asset exporter supports softimage clusters and multiple materials. (I think torque uses COLLADA). I’m willing to bet it does, but a quick test with a cube and two or three materials would answer that quickly. I would also do a test to see what happens when i have a material applied to the object AND a material applied via cluster.
Can someone help me and give me step-by-step instructions on how to create multiple clusters/textures on a model? Say I have a cube and I want each side to have it’s own texture. I selected a face, create a cluster for each, but how do you assign a unique material/texture for each side?
Thanks!
Just create the materials in the material manager and assign them to the faces (select the face, then rightclick on the material in the material manager and click ‘assign to selection’). The clusters will be created automatically.
Alternatively, you can of course create the cluster first, select it in the explorer (or click the ‘Clusters’ button on the right side of the screen while the object is selected and select the cluster from the list) and assign the material from the material manager.
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