Disappearing meshes

Anyone remember the recent thread about disappearing meshes - I was trying to find it.

It was the thread showing a character on the floor that suddenly disppeared if you moved the camera too far up/down/left/right of the mesh (while it was still meant to be on the screen).

I'm trying to find the solution to this as, technically, it must be fixable. It doesn't happen with all models, so it must be something in the construction of particular models.

Anyone rember the thread or how to solve this?

I found a thread that may have some answers - so I am just storing it here (in this thread):

http://www.blitzbasic.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=40479

But this is not the thread - I am just putting it here (and anthing else I dig up)

Found another:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=35594

I had some bother with this myself. It's been fixed with the latest B3D update.

I'd never known this problem prior to a new set of animated characters I am using.

I'm wary of using MeshCullBox. It certainly works, but I wonder what the downside of using it is (if any) against having models that work properly with B3D?

To be honest, I still don't fully understand why my new set of models have this mesh problem - I'd rather attempt to fix them than use a workaround.

It's pretty simple. When you have a static mesh, Blitz knows exactly where the vertices are and so it can simply define a bounding box for it and when that entire box is not visible on the screen, Blitz doesn't bother rendering your mesh, because it too cannot be visible.

With an animated mesh, Blitz has to estimate the bounding box. Your models evidently move away from the starting pose during their animation and they end up so far away from the starting pose that they are beyond the bounding box that Blitz calculated for them. So even though they are visible, the bounding box Blitz calculated for them is not, and Blitz takes the decision not to render them.

If you set the bounding box manually, you can ensure that the bounding box is the correct size and make sure they are never incorrectly determined as being out of sight.

There's no downside to this. If you massively overestimate the bounding box then you will simply be drawing an actor that is not visible, wasting a little time. So be careful not to overestimate the bounding box.

You can't "fix them" without completely reanimating them, or at least the animations which take them furthest from their original pose. You can do that if you want, but I don't recommend it. Blitz has long needed a command to manually set the bounding box, so why spurn it now that it's finally implemented?

I concur with Gabriel.

I concur with Beaker

I concur with Smiff.