Merge It!!!

[Ydnar]

Okay i was working on a few things and for me to do some of the cool stuff i have planning for the animation i can't do with grouped objects ( Can't tell what it is about... ) but how would one go about merging two objects together so there just one object, instead of a bunch of little objects grouped???

Any help will be very needed and well used. thank you

[Funkymunkey90]

You can either use Boolean or group the objects together if you think you might want to edit one part. You will have to change the PIVOT point after the objects are grouped. If the objects are a Booleaned (union or subtract) the pivot point will stay where the first objects pivots' point was.

To edit objects that are in a group just open the group and edit the part you want to edit, then close the group. You can’t edit anything if it has been booleaned.

Connect is also another thing you can use, but sometimes it messes up when the animate button it clicked, some connect.dll or something like that.

It is just Team 384
Animation Team Captain

[Daishichimaru]

Quite simple. First, for safety's sake, clone the group and hide the backup. Next you need to assign all the objects in the group a dummy texture (be sure it's the SAME texture). Ungroup it, pick one of the objects, and collapse it to an editable mesh (right click, quad panel 1 >convert to. Go into the editable mesh parameters in the modify panel and scroll down to where it says "attach." Click that button and select all the other objects you want to merge. Deselect attach and open up the material editor. Change your dummy texture's type to "multi/sub-object" and set the number of textures to however many different textures were present in your origional group. Recreate those textures in the texture slots for the multi/sub texture (note that each box in the main interface of this texture type allows you to create a standalone texture which can be named independently to help you keep track. Just be careful that you don't drag-copy existing textures into one of these to try and save the trouble of recreating it- you'll lose the whole thing). Once you recreate all your needed textures, tab back to the modify panel and apply a MeshSelect modifier. Go into polygon subobject mode and select all faces that would have a single texture, and while keeping subobject mode on apply a Material modifier. Change the "material channel" until the texture you want on those faces shows up. Then you apply another MeshSelect, grab the next set, and apply a new Material modifier. Repeat this process until you've got all the faces textured. You can check the material channel for a particular texture by looking in the material editor for your multi/sub texture and seeing which channel number corresponds to the texture itself. All you have to do now is fix the pivot point for your new mesh object and you're good to go! I recommend making the origional group undrenderable (edit>object properties>uncheck the "renderable" box) and freezing it (display>freeze selected, check hide frozen objects box) just in case something goes wrong so you'll have a backup. Hope this helps.

[Ydnar]

Yhea that helped alot guy's, thank you... one more questions what would be the simplist way to make a texture for a soccor ball made with ngons??? if you need to see the file i am more then willing to give, it was'nt all that hard to make, but i am stuck at making a texture i think would be fun but don't know how to do it for the specified object...

[Funkymunkey90]

You can try and make a complex map or turn it into an edit mesh and assign each panel a different material, or create a multi-material map and assign a different channel for each ngon you have

Team 384
Animation Team Captain

[Daishichimaru]

The easiest way would be to do another multi/sub map and mesh select>material map the separate faces.

[ComBBAT_Albrot]

Another quick and dirty way to make a group one object (useful for getting Character Studio to physique a group... ugh, dont even get me started) is to make the group the only thing in the scene, then exporting it as a .3ds mesh and importing it into an empty scene (or whatever scene you want to animate it in)... Your basic texture information will stay the same, but you'll lose advanced properties like raytracing on particular sections and things like that.
If the object has simple materials, that would be a good way to make it one mesh, in my humble opinion.