Mesh Houses best practices ?

[Trinity Dejavu]

Just thinking about making a building in mesh, roughly 20x20x10 and having not done this before im wondering if it's better to make it as a single object or many many smaller componants ? Also are there any other large mesh building best practices I should be aware of before I dive in ?  

[Drongle McMahon]

It's up to you to decide. There are several relevant considerations. If you make it as one piece, you will have to learn how to make a physics shape you can get inside, which is not exactly trivial. If you make it as separate pieces, you can often get away with the default physics shapes. Several pieces will switch LOD at different distances. That can be used to your advantage or it can make the uncoordinated switching unpleasant, depending on the details. Generally a collection of smaller pieces will have a lower land impact, a side effect of the closer LOD switching. However, if each piece becomes very simple, then the collection can have the higher land impact.

There are many extensive threads discussing these issue in this forum (and its predecessor in the archive). I particular recommend posts from Maeve Balfour, who looked carefully into the advantages of combining single simple large external meshes, to preserve high LOD distance, with smaller internal meshes that can be given very stringent LOD reductions because they are never seen from distance.

[Alisha Matova]

I'll add a little too.

 

I would guess a one mesh file house would be the most effecient. But you'll have to build each LOD level(removing smaller details at lower levels) and make a physics shape.

The down side of uploading that way, the end result isn't very flexible in world.

 

If you mesh the building in a more modular way, all is far more flexible in world. As you'll pretty much have a mesh house building kit by the time you're done. One big advantage to this method, you can be very aggressive with the inside house parts LOD, since you'll have to be in there to see them. Also, the linked mesh parts are more flexible for texturing.

 

I still don't know which is best. I assume it depends on many factors.