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  • Published 28 Apr 2020

Join Modifier

Often when working in games, you want to use as few objects as possible to describe a thing since any extra meshes can mean extra draw calls - this is especially true with mobile and mobile VR titles. However, when working with a complex scene it can be nice to keep things as separate objects so it's easier to move and position things, hence my dilemma. I 'can' manually do this myself, but if you have an environment with hundreds/thousands of objects it can be annoying to have to make a joined copy of your mesh every time that you update things. This also forces you to apply your modifier stack per object.

What I want is a new modifier that simply joins as many objects together into a single mesh, bringing any material, UV, vertex color data, etc. with it. Boolean does not work well for this since it changes the geometry of intersecting meshes; I want the meshes to simply be added together. I would want this modifier to respect the other object's modifiers, and combine the objects post-modifiers, also respecting their viewport/render visibilities for viewport management and rendering/export purposes. ie. if I have a Subsurface on object A, and I add object A to object B with a Join Modifier, object A would still appear Subsurfaced in object B's Joined result. Therefore, if viewport visibility of the A's Subsurface modifier is off, but the Render visibility is on, when I export B the Subsurface result of A would be used.

Edit: Additionally, the ability to add Collections to the Join list could also be very helpful (ie. so I don't have to manually add every object that I want joined).

Edit 2: +Collection Instances

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 12 Downvote 0
Frank
28 Apr 2020

7 Comments

costa

This is an amazing suggestion, it could be developed even more if you could for example attach it to particular face maps (screws, rivets) maybe scale the other object down and things like this.

1
dfer

this has actually been raised before blender.community/c/rightclickselect/tWbbbc/ so technically it's a duplicate, I think this is perhaps a clearer suggestion though.

I think it's a good idea!

Procedural joining would be very useful for my workflows, and the suggestion to be able to use collections is a really good one.

One of the commenters on the other post suggested having Join as an extra mode in the Boolean node/modifier, although perhaps that would entail renaming the Boolean modifier to something else (not sure that Join is a boolean operation?). Since that also supports Collections already that would make a lot of sense!

So Join would just be another tab along with Intersect / Union / Difference , and I'd suggest it might want a merge points option, but hey that's icing on the cake :-)

Frank Author

blenderartists.org/t/fbx-bundle/1102475/39

'Aquatic Nightmare' has been working on update to the FBX Bundle add-on, that has an on-export Merge feature, that works with Collections/Collection Instances.

damian_winnichenko

If you're ready to dive into Blender code, you could comment out this part in MOD_Boolean.c file: 

BM_mesh_intersect(bm,
                          looptris,
                          tottri,
                          bm_face_isect_pair,
                          NULL,
                          false,
                          use_separate,
                          use_dissolve,
                          use_island_connect,
                          false,
                          false,
                          bmd->operation,
                          bmd->double_threshold);
zuorion

Workaround that is use now: Use Array modifier with start Cap, no offset, single count

its silly, but it works

Darknoodles

* @Pawel Piotrowski * Did think about it XD Another way if the objects are not intersecting is to use the boolean with union

dfer

haha it's so silly, but yes I guess it would work :-) Would love to have a join modifier, it would be super useful for procedural stuff