Ryzom

siredblood,

The acronym IG stands for Instance Group. To understand this name you must also understand some of the basic internals of NeL. A Shape is a definition of a mesh object or some other renderable. An Instance is an actual rendered instance of a shape. Now if you had a "ball" shape and you created 4 instances of it the system would only load 1 set of vertices/etc. An Instance Group is a collection of instances.

Lets say that we wanted to load an apartment. It has the interior walls, three tables, two chairs, some pens on the table and a potted plant. Now we would have to have some way of knowing where all of these went and relative to each other so that they could be translated in world-space. This is the purpose of an Instance Group. In MAX you can load a variety of shapes into a scene, arrange them how you want it to look and then flag them all as instances in an instance group.

When the client loads this instance group it will find all of the shapes in the shape bank and create instances of all of them, arrange them into the coordinates you set in MAX and then translate them to the position you set in the world.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
sfb
/s

great! Perfect, makes perceft sence, thanks a bunch!

I come from blitz3d, things are a tad different in the building blocks.

Thanks again for the help!

ok, sorry for all the questions :)

Mesh is complete, and there is 20 or so seperate groups with the interior mesh.

so...

is this correct:

I highlight all > export .ig
Then select what to export as .shape?? if i select the entire thing, it exports all 20 groups as seperate .shape meshes, rather then a single mesh.

So this is where i get lost... do i select all again? or just pick 1 group of the bunch and call it good? ... is there a paticular name i need to call a group?

thanks for all the help :D