Ground jigsaw

General Discussion
1

Hi.
I’m currently experimenting with making a “ground”, a simple flat one built up like a jigsaw from flat blender models (like beermats for the moment). Is there a recommended size for my ground pieces? Will I run into trouble later by doing this?

2

The size doesn’t matter. You do need to keep in mind that if you keep each tile as a different object, you might end up with thousands of geoms batched to the video card – which drains performance.
If you keep small tiles, after you’ve placed them, it’s recommended to call flattenStrong() on a parent nodepath to turn all tiles into one big mesh.

3

Thanks. They will all be the same basic object for now, although I may want to get more inventive later on and add more variety.

That sounds like something I will definitely be using. Cheers :smiley:

4

Oh, if they are all exactly the same, you can save some performance (I think) by making instances:
panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Instancing

5

Thanks for the link. Even if I add more parts later I think I will still have lots of repeated pieces so this should come in handy.

6

pro-rsoft, instances help animations … with my bench marks they do squat for regular solids…

Your terrain sounds very interesting i had ideas like that too. As pro said flattenStrong is your freind.

7

Thanks :smiley:
I think one of the main selling points of this approach is the possibility of generating random maps, but I’ll worry about that later on.