best way to have a mesh with multiple textures

advanced
#1

Hey all

I’m currently working on a blender file loader. https://github.com/underdoeg/ofxBlender

I can load blender meshes into an ofMesh just fine. But I am not sure yet on the best way to handle material and texture informations. Because blender stores materials per face. So a mesh can have an unlimited amount of materials which is nice, especially for textures.

That is something I’d like to port at one point. Should I just add an ofMesh for each texture/material combination. Or is there a way to draw an ofMesh partially. Like draw Faces number 12 to 20? That would make things way easier to handle.

thanks for thoughts

#2

You could try storing the indicies, and then changing them based on what you need to draw and then restoring the originals. You would have to call a draw call after every time you wanted to draw part of the mesh.
something like

  
  
vector<ofIndexType> originalIndicies = mesh.getIndicies();  
  
vector<ofIndexType> mySweetIndicies = mesh.getIndicies();  
int myStartIndex = mySweetIndicies.size()/2;  
int myStopIndex = mySweetIndicies.size();  
  
mySweetIndicies.erase( mySweetIndicies.begin()+myStartIndex, mySweetIndicies.begin()+myStopIndex);  
mesh.clearIndices();  
mesh.addIndices( mySweetIndicies );  
  
mesh.draw();  
  
mesh.clearIndices();  
mesh.addIndices( originalIndicies );

This should work, though I didnt test it.

Nick