Video shows the process of cleaning up, optimizing and exporting a railing section game model for use, in this instance, in Radiant and an idTech BSP based game.For more general instructions on exporting ASE from Blender click hereAn advantage of brush (BSP) based game engines is that material constructed in Radiant (or other editor) can be exported for conversion, prep and use as a model. There are a number of reasons this might need to be done, typically to reduce the reliance of incidentals using light-maps, which for smaller details can be wasteful - small details that might otherwise not be seen by the player close-up use precious light map space that could be better utilised on something else. However, because BSP style editing is based on volumes, material often converts to solid (convex) forms that always needs to be cleaned up and properly optimised. This can mean removing additional vertices, surfaces, re-mapping the objects UVW's etc.
Be mindful of;
- smoothing and vertex splits required for them
- orientation of surfaces
- reducing texture/shader use (elements using the same texture should be joined)
- in-game shading issues due to too few vertices (vertex-lit objects)
- objects origin both in Blender and how that relates to model placement in Radiant
- manually triangulate final mesh to avoid texture flipping issues
