Convert model to box?

Questions
1

I hope i am able to express my question in an understandable way :slight_smile:

so basically i have some 3D models provided to me to use in an application. these are created in some tools like Blender or something, but at the end of the day i have something that is incredibly over-detailed for my purposes. the generated face count is 180,000, for something that represents 18"x18"x24" in the real world. that type of detail is useful for the project it was designed for, but for what I’m trying to do in a webGL application, it’s a bit overkill.

However simplifying the mesh (via meshlab, etc) has been…not the most satisfying.

but i have an idea and I dunno if this is doable or stupid or what. This particular model and most of the ones I need to work with, will not be animated. so I’m wondering…is there a way to create a box mesh (like the bounding box size), and texture it on the 6 sides so that it looks like the model?

for example, here’s a model i found on the web: Poliigon

imagine you just want to put 20x20 of them around, but the user will never really get close. so, instead of a super high triangle/face count, wouldn’t it be cool to have a shared material on cloned boxes?

Is there a term for this, or process, and maybe I can do it?

Thanks

2

Hi @Keeger

What comes to my mind is to use 3d sprites like in this doc page : Sprites - Babylon.js Documentation

If the camera doesn’t come close enough, it can be a good fit. You’ll have to render your mesh into an image and use that image as a texture source for the sprite.

3

i don’t see anything in that article about a 3d sprite? i see a mention of 2.5D, which i guess is probably an iso view.

i was thinking of something along the lines of like a skybox i guess, but on the outside?

4

It’s quite sure that faking using a mapped cube will looks… strange. Maybe you can use billboards (similar as Cedric said), or the good old school plane-crossing vegetation technique. Problem is that you will have to deal with alpha.

Best way is of course to manually create LODs.