Merge Meshes Operator
The Merge Meshes operator combines several polygon meshes into one. Its main use is hair cards of different topology: each kind of card comes from its own Mesh from Strands operator, and Merge Meshes turns them into a single mesh with a single hair card atlas. See Mixing card types in one groom on the Hair Cards page for the whole workflow; the Add Card Layer button of the Hair Cards tool adds and wires this operator for you.
How merging works
The meshes are combined in the order they are connected, and the result is placed in the object space of the first one. Each mesh can come with the texture atlas laid over it, the first atlas belonging to the first mesh and so on. When it does, the islands of all the atlases are packed together into one atlas and the texture coordinates of every mesh are moved to match:
- Cards keep their shape and their size relative to the cards of the other meshes, so a tube and a flat card built at the same scale get the same texture resolution.
- An island keeps the projection it was built with, so tube islands are still textured around the tube.
- Every island keeps an identifier of its own, so a hair card assigned to an island stays on it when another mesh's islands change.
A mesh which comes without an atlas is combined with its texture coordinates as they are.
Parameters
- Texture Channel - the texture channel carrying the atlas coordinates of the input meshes. The other channels are combined without being changed.
- Texture Island Padding - the empty gutter kept around every island in the merged atlas, as a fraction of the whole atlas, with the same meaning as in Mesh from Strands.
Related
- Hair Cards - texturing the merged cards.
- Rendering Hair as Mesh Geometry - generates each layer's cards.
- Edit Mesh Tool - editing the resulting mesh.