Mesh parenting & cloning

Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I have a question w.r.t. mesh parenting in babylon.

I think it would be the best if I explain my question based on an example:

  • Assume I have a car consisting of many different objects as an array of wheels, an array of seats an lots of other stuff.
  • Now, I want to move the car. So, I parent the whole structure and move it with one line of code.
  • I also need to open the doors, which is not a problem as I can store the references to the sub objects and move them separately
  • However, I want to clone the car (as I do have multiple copies of it in the scene)
  • And again, I want to move submeshes (doors) of the copied car.

Of course, I could clone all of the children, rebuild the parenting structure, and remember the references of the cloned children.

However, I wonder if there is a more generic way for cloning a parented mesh-structure such that the children are retrievable? (maybe working with the predicate function of getChildren or similar)

Maybe someone had a similar dilemma, or how would you approach such a problem?

Thx in advance :wink:

1 Like
2

you could clone with children then rely on getChildren with a predicate targetting the name/id of the meshes so that this could be factored in only one function on your to clone and retrieve the objects.

3

But would he using instancing then?

4

It might if the materials stay the same and for instance the animation do not involve skeletons with different anim groups playing at once :slight_smile:

In this case it would be more performant but does not change the discovery issue for the cloned submesh I guess

5

Hey all,

thank you very much for the tips.

  • (w.r.t. Instances: unfortunately I do change maetrials after cloning, but thx for the tip @Leon )
  • So I think getChildren + predicate would be the way to go. TY @sebavan .

I do have a couple of different objects “prototypes”, so if anyone comes up with an even more generic idea he/she is very welcome.

(My dilemma with assigning names or ids is twofolod: (1) For every “prototype” a clone function is required. It would analyse the cloned mesh and retrieve submeshes by getChildren(byName) or so. (2) if you have array-like structures as X wheels or similar, some workaround as name = name + index is required, which of course doesn’t look to good)

THX :wink: