Breaking the 64k limit.

Hello folks... I was curious if any of you guys had a clue about this one.

Say I have a mesh that is 146,000 poly's give or take. The mesh is in OBJ format. Now if one were to load this to a surface it would be fine.. until the renderworld() function is called... at which point blitz mav's. So my question to you guys is it possible to manipulate a large mesh(> that blitz's display limit)?

The said object is a terrain mesh. Without using an external editor(yeah mel scripting in maya didnt pan out for this one due to remainders and offsets) is it possible to take a large mesh, divide it up into a grid of 16x16 separate meshes retaining UV coords during the object's load and have this take place in less than say 30 seconds?

Thanks,
Scott

There's a clusterisemesh function in the archives that does this. NOt sure who wrote it though.

Stevie

The 64k limitation is defined by the surface not the mesh entity. So you rebuild the mesh in 64k vertex/poly chunks, and each time duplicating the original surface. This way it looks the same but is internally split up into multiple surfaces within the same mesh. When copying vertices & poly's you copy the vertex normals as well as the uvw coordinates, so textures remain intact...

Since you import an OBJ - and therefor have to build the mesh manually anyway - you can implement this into the loader, this way it shouldn't take any additional time at all. It will only cost you additional surfaces. In your case 146k/64k = 2.3 = 3 surfaces in stead of the original 1 surface.

Hope this helps,

:Danny