Tracks Road mesh doubling vert count from blender to SDK?

[Fearthefocus]

Hey everyone. I've been working on a new physical road mesh for my Monticello track build but am getting frustrated with SDK or Blender or both. I've created the road mesh using @LilSki tips and tricks but every time I export the mesh from blender I am getting the object has too many verts error in SDK. In blender I have been cutting the pieces down to half the vert count needed but am still getting the error. Am I doing something wrong, setting or otherwise, or am I just a dumb ____ and need to continue cutting the pieces down?

Hoping someone has run into this in the past. Thanks everyone!

 

[John514]

Hey everyone. I've been working on a new physical road mesh for my Monticello track build but am getting frustrated with SDK or Blender or both. I've created the road mesh using @LilSki tips and tricks but every time I export the mesh from blender I am getting the object has too many verts error in SDK. In blender I have been cutting the pieces down to half the vert count needed but am still getting the error. Am I doing something wrong, setting or otherwise, or am I just a dumb ____ and need to continue cutting the pieces down?

Hoping someone has run into this in the past. Thanks everyone!

I'll suggest something that I just learned about the other day, when my vertex count kept being much larger than what I saw on Blender:

Make sure you haven't UV mapped your mesh in such a way where there are a lot of UV seams. Apparently, UV seams work just like split edges, where the vertices on the seam are duplicated. Physical mesh doesnt need to be mapped anyway so make sure you clear any seams and then maybe do a "project from view" unwrap to make a UV map with as few seams as possible.

Other causes might be:

• You have marked edges as sharp. This will split the edges on export, increasing the vertex count.
• You have set shading to flat. That also does the same thing on export.
• Finally, your mesh might be split already for some reason. You can use "Mesh > Cleanup > Merge Vertices > By distance" to get rid of any duplicates.

 

[Please Stop This]

this "too many verts" error is for a single mesh, it even says which mesh in particular

so just divide your big meshes into two, so they dont contain more that 64k tris

note: meshes made of quads will be converted to tris
note2: in edit mode select half of the mesh's vertices and press "p" -> Separate -> by selection

 

[Fearthefocus]

Here are a couple screen shots that I took. Just not sure where I'm getting the extremely different counts.

 

[Please Stop This]

the green is the one in question
you may stay below even 50k, ksEditor does some things on import
just cut that mesh into two in the middle

 

[Please Stop This]

and as said if its quads will be converted to tris, so doubeling you count

 

[John514]

and as said if its quads will be converted to tris, so doubeling you count

quads to tris doesnt increase vertex count unless the edges get split. Otherwise they share vertices.

 

[Please Stop This]

just do it (2 objects)

 

[Stereo]

Anyway count's nearly quadrupling so it's probably as mentioned above (quads set to flat shading) since that means the 4 quads at each vertex get their own vertex.

 

[Fearthefocus]

The flat shading makes sense. I'll have to try that tonight. I've just felt that my FPS has been really low for as simple a track that I have made. Thanks for the help you guys! I really appreciate it!

 

[Stereo]

FPS should mainly be limited by visible triangles, that's why tracks generally use a separate visual and physics surface mesh. Visual one tends to be on the order of 1 square metre per quad or more.

Textures can be another source of issues if they're hitting limits of videocard memory, if you're using dds it should be pretty obvious (2GB of textures on a 2GB card) but if you use png they take up more space in memory than in the kn5.

 

[GT VIRUS]

The vert count (As far as I know) also includes UV verts, so will always be half of what is counted in blender

 

[Fearthefocus]

The flat shading was the problem! As soon as I switched that the vert counts matched in both blender and SDK. Thanks for all the input! You guys are awesome! Now time to test out the new mesh!

 

[Fearthefocus]

Ok. Starting to get frustrated. Is there such thing as too much mesh for a road surface? When I load my new road mesh there are blank spots where I fall through the map. The parts that do work are part smooth part like there is multiple layers on top of each other. All normals are aligned and surfaces are unchanged from a working version. The only thing I added was some modifiers to give the road the uneven mesh look that Lilski uses.... Arghhhh! Thoughts?

 

[Please Stop This]

its a sign of the mesh still being too long/having too much verts, divide down further

 

[Fearthefocus]

That did the trick. Works like a charm now! Only have 4 more layouts to go...