One Geom is equivalent to what exactly? One polygon within a mesh? One face within a mesh, maybe?
The Geom concept is new to me, but then again, so is P3D engine concepts.
I was actually looking for a more straight forward answer since I seen that section in the manual.
I will keep my original conclusion that a geom is a single polygon of a Mesh.
or maybe it’s just stripped vertex data being held in one group (according to type). In other words, the entire Mesh is being broken down into units.
One Geom is one mesh (a bunch of triangles or lines or points or triangle strips).
That’s a primitive (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_primitive). A Geom is a mesh composed of primitives, as stated in that manual page.
A mesh is but one structure composed of tris, lines, etc. The manual talks about a Geom is if it’s a group of tris, lines, etc… If you where to divide a mesh based on this you would have so many groups depending on the model. Are those sub groups not geoms? A mesh is a mesh, why call it a geom? If the grouping of primitives within a mesh equal a geom, then that makes sense.
or
If a model was compsed of individual meshes, then that would make sense also. The thing is, some models are just one mesh.
…
I give up. No need to worry about it. I don’t plan on doing any coding on the geom level anyway.
Panda just doesn’t use the “mesh” terminology. “geom” stands for “geometry”, and it represents one batch that will be sent to the GPU when rendered.
You cannot change states or transforms (not counting animations) below the geom level, so the ‘grouping’ is functionally important in that sense too.