I’m building an applet that will allow me to create a race track model from a line drawing. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m building the track geometry, and I’m confident that I can handle it.
The part that concerns me is what comes next: adding additional details along the track. Things like a gate around the finish line, and posts along the edge. I have ways to locate the positions and rotations for these things, but if I simply add them as their own models and position/rotate them, I’ll be sending a large number of low poly (100-200 tris) model nodes to the GPU. Potentially hundreds. I’m not worried about the number of polygons, but I recall that Panda3D starts to get serious graphics lag when there are large numbers of model nodes.
The solution, as far as I know, is to embed all of the track detail models into a single egg, as if I had made them all in place in a modeling program. I’m wondering if anyone has any advice to accomplish this. If I re-create the modeled details in code I could offset the vertices to position them, but I think rotation would require some matrix math or something. That is not my forte.
My other thought is maybe I can load up one of the detail models, position and rotate it at each point where I want one, and then get the vertex info from that model and duplicate it into an egg, thus creating an egg that contains all of the details in a single geom. I don’t know if it’s possible to get the info I would need from the model, though.
Any thoughts?