I built an overcomplicated, high maintenance creature, but I am fond of him anyway. In the lessons, the orc has separate meshes for the horns, teeth and shackle, but I realized that I made a lot more than that between the teeth, foot claws, finger claws, armlets, bracelets, anklets, tongue, eyes and horns, he has as many around 60 bits of crap floating around him. Joining the upper and lower sets of teeth into two sets cuts it down a good bit, since they will move rigidly with the rest of the mouth, and I guess I could also join all the toe claws into a single mesh, since I am sure we wonât be rigging toes. But what about the rest?
Would there be major performance drawbacks to having all of this junk floating around as separate meshes? This is a hypothetical question, since this model is not headed towards a particular project. What would be the consequences (besides making or saving extra work) of:
- Leaving the fingers, and so on, as independent meshes and simply parenting them to the appropriate bones
- Joining them to the lo-poly body mesh, but not fusing the meshes
- Joining them to the lo-poly body mesh, and fusing them into a single, completely manifold mesh
This is my lo-poly guy (with some temporary shaders applied)
He is loosely inspired by this painting: