Hi everyone. I've started work on my first static mesh for the UDK. I come from a programming background so I'm not familiar with the proper construction methods used for models.
The current way I'm going about doing it is simply deforming a plane. It was brought to my attention that the Unreal 3 engine would prefer not to deal with meshes like that and would rather work with "thick" meshes.
Here are some screenshots to show what I'm trying to describe:
My Current Method:
[SCREENSHOT]http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/open.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
It's a simple plane that's been subdivided and had its verts scooted around. The material to be used on it will be single-sided.
The Suggested Method:
[SCREENSHOT]http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/closed.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
Notice how now the mesh is thick.
I'm trying to avoid the latter method since it just makes more work with messing with the texture mapping. Not to mention, there's no sense in essentially doubling the amount of draw calls if one side of the "thick" mesh has multiple materials while the other has a single material.
I was hoping somebody could shed some light on whether or not UE3 will be fine with "thin" (planar) static meshes or if there's some important reason that I should be creating "thick" static meshes.
Thanks
The current way I'm going about doing it is simply deforming a plane. It was brought to my attention that the Unreal 3 engine would prefer not to deal with meshes like that and would rather work with "thick" meshes.
Here are some screenshots to show what I'm trying to describe:
My Current Method:
[SCREENSHOT]http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/open.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
It's a simple plane that's been subdivided and had its verts scooted around. The material to be used on it will be single-sided.
The Suggested Method:
[SCREENSHOT]http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/closed.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
Notice how now the mesh is thick.
I'm trying to avoid the latter method since it just makes more work with messing with the texture mapping. Not to mention, there's no sense in essentially doubling the amount of draw calls if one side of the "thick" mesh has multiple materials while the other has a single material.
I was hoping somebody could shed some light on whether or not UE3 will be fine with "thin" (planar) static meshes or if there's some important reason that I should be creating "thick" static meshes.
Thanks
