Best way to structure a model before importing?

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:bust_in_silhouette: Asked By Zylann
:warning: Old Version Published before Godot 3 was released.

I am learning modeling in Blender and I have come to a point I wonder how to have multiple materials on the same animated model.

The question: what is the best way to organize the different parts of an animated, textured model in Blender for use un Godot later on?

I currently have two choices:

  1. Have multiple meshes in Blender, each with one material, shared or not. This works fine, and in Godot I can see the materials (although their names are numbers Oo). However at the moment I don’t know how to share the same uv-map for the same model and the only way I found so far is to join all my objects into one big mesh.

Which leads me to option 2.

  1. Have a single mesh with face groups having different materials but a shared uv-map, so I can have a single texture for the whole model. It would take a slightly different path to animate it though, like delimiting bone weights manually. I never tested this option yet, given how “destructive” it is compared to 1), I have to apply modifiers which makes it tedious to change things afterwards.

Now, it looks like half concerns Blender itself, but also Godot because I don’t know how well it handles multi-materials, or which structure it works better with.

FYI, I am doing this thing:
enter image description here

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: GlaDOSik

My models uses multiple meshes. For example, my character is naked and clothes is another mesh on top of it. Both uses one texture. You’re on the right path with 1. - the good idea is to join them into one mesh. The better idea is to use Blender’s Texture Atlas plugin. Whenever you need to unwrap the model, it will make a one big temp mesh so you can easily lay down your UVs. Once you are done, it will separate them.