General Guidelines for Meshes

This page sets some basic guidelines for meshes in Orxonox, much like a styleguide for programmers. Read this before you start with your model, it makes thing allot easier.

Polygon count

Reduce your number of polygons to the absolute minimum (for comparison: the main ship 'assff' only has about 800 Polygons). Don't create details which can't be viewed in the game. You can check the current number of Faces (Fa) of your model directly in Blender (Object Mode). Note that the final model in Orxonox will only have triangles, so the number of polygons may differ. (in Edit Mode navigate to the Menu 'Mesh/Faces/Convert Quads to Trinagles' or CTRL T to get a more accurate number).

Double Vertices, Strange Shapes

Before you export a model check if you have by accident created anything that could mess your mesh up. In Edit Mode select your whole Model (A) then navigate to 'Mesh/Vertices/RemoveDoubles' to remove any overlapping vertices. Also don't create any very slim shapes or too sharp corners as they will not turn out well.

Name Your Materials

Make sure your materials don't still have the generic name ('Material', 'Material.001', …), otherwise Orxonox might not choose the correct material for your model. Ogre generates a database of all materials used and the primary key is the name of a material. So if two materials have the same name, the first one to be located is chosen (usually not the right one). The material name is assigned just above the mesh name in the Materials tab. Note: if you have more than one material assigned to one specific object you must scroll through all of them and assign a unique name to each.