Clean Models fragmented tverts?

[Legacy_AlgernonsGhost]

               I get a lot of these kinds of entries in the summary after running Clean Models 351:

warning - tverts of tree_e are fragmented in 68 groups

Is that a problem, and what exactly does it mean?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               It's not a problem - it's just a warning. It's CM3's way of saying "I found this - is this okay with you?"

On a tree we would expect the faces on each piece of foliage to be UV mapped separately from the faces on each other, separate, piece of foliage, so in this case there's nothing wrong. If it were a plain piece of cobblestone wall and the UV mapping had gone crazy because someone had dropped the ball in GMax, we would have known to worry.

Thanks for using CM3 '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_AlgernonsGhost]

               Thanks for the explanation. I'm new to altering tiles, and am still fairly vague on some of the terminology even. So, tverts must refer to texture verts, or a bad assumption?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <taking things philosophically...>

tverts=texture verts, yes.

Also, the coordinate system is a mirror of the x-y-z coordinates, but labeled u-v-w. So if you are adjusting the position of a texture, you are altering its UVW map, and if you are "unwrapping" a texture to modify it, you are doing a uvw unwrap.

When you use the uvw editor in (g)max, you can see where the vertixes fall on the texture and move them around to adjust things. For some things, like wrapping a texture around a pillar, you want all the faces to be congruent (and the tverts "welded" together) so the smoothing groups (groups of faces that use a math algorythm to smooth the transition of texture from one face to another) work to bring the texture together into a cohesive whole.

In other cases, particularly when using a texture "atlas" such as Cestus is using for this month's torcs, some parts will use one part of the texture, while other parts will use a completely different part of the texture. Hence they will be fragmented.

It's when, as OMB said, you have a relatively simple model, but none of the faces are wielded and each face is separate on the texture map that you need to do some work.

<...cuz he just can't help taking things>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_AlgernonsGhost]

               Thanks for the additional explanation, Rolo, that's helpful.