koobas.hobune.stream
How can I remove redundant vertices in custom mesh?
Hi, I've been working on a voxel-based model builder to create assets and characters for my voxel-based game. It has been working rather well so far, however I recently encountered an error with the amount of vertices in the model.
I was working on a model larger than my previous attempts, and I had almost finished when suddenly it disappeared and Unity threw a Mesh.vertices too large exception. I realized that with each voxel/block I was placing there was obviously a heap of vertices to go with it and that it was going to prevent me from building the size of objects I required.
And so I am looking for a solution that will allow me to reduce the amount of vertices in the models I create. One theory I have is somehow figuring out which faces are part of a larger face (i.e 4 squares alligned that make up a larger square) and then removing the vertices in the middle to create a larger face/triangles from the remaining corner vertices. I have no idea how to do this!
Simply ask for any pictures or code snippets that will be needed and I'll try and provide them as soon as I can. Thank you!
Are you creating these models programmatically (by generating vertex and index arrays) or are you modelling them in external software?
If former, I recommend latter. You're talking about selective edge removal on co-planar surfaces. That's insanely complex.
I would recommend doing that in 3D software - in 3DS $$anonymous$$ax for example, to remove unnecessary edges, simply go into Edge edit more, select edge you want removed, and hit Backspace to remove only the edge, or Ctrl+Backspace to remove both the edge and it's for$$anonymous$$g vertices.
If you're talking about generating $$anonymous$$inecraft-alike environments from cubes and just want to optimize your world, then it's a different situation, which you cannot approach by removing edges from flat surfaces since different blocks use different textures (materials). Ins$$anonymous$$d, you need to only generate the surface blocks and then cull the sides of the cube that are not exposed (cannot be seen anyway). This also requires re-generating those sides when they will be seen, such as moving a neighbour block. Tons of articles on those approaches.
Sorry for being vague. Yes i am using programmatically created meshes by specifying vertices and triangles that make up the objects. I would use an external program but this just happens to be the only way it will work for my particular application. I will look into greedy mesh algorithms and update back on here. Thank you so much for all of your replies! :)
Greedy mesh algorithms is probably the way to go. That being said, if you have some additional information about your meshes, you might be able to create something better/faster/easier than a generalized algorithm.
Example: I built some walls from quads, and figured that I should combine the entire wall into one mesh. Since I knew that the quads were all at the same height, and rotated one out of eight directions, I could pretty easily find continous walls of quads, discard every piece but the end pieces, and then create a new mesh from the furthermost verts of those meshes. A generalized algorithm would have worked, but it would probably have taken a lot more time to implement.
If your vert positions follow some kind of grid, or you know something specific about the rotations of your faces, you could do something similar.
