Unions contain more data than meshes, yeah?
Something like Blender can be very complicated for new users.
If they use unions you have more data to stream even though it may be unnecessary.
Wouldn’t being able to create a copy of a union in which the geometry is stored as a mesh be a good entry point for those wanting the efficiency and not to mess with complex 3D modeling software?
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So if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re proposing to save Unions as Meshes so that they don’t contain as much data? That’s… not how it works at all (edit: as buildthomas brings up, I’m also quite certain that composition data does not actively consume memory in-game).
Unions are so memory-heavy because of how they’re assembled, not because they’re simply being identified as Unions. You can see just how “bulky” Roblox’s base objects are by importing them into Blender. If you want to make a memory-efficient object, you really need to learn how to use a 3D modeling software.
If it helps, features such as the Boolean modifier in Blender function identically to Roblox’s CSG system.
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It contains all the data of how they are assembled, but once you have that final result, you may not need that data. You just need the raw geometry as is. Pretty sure there is a way to convert and strip all the unnecessary information. To simplify the information.
You can automate it pretty well I think. Automated mesh manipulation isn’t new.
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Unions have mesh, physics and composition data. The latter allows Studio to deconstruct the object again when you try to undo the union. A union to mesh feature like this would only strip off that composition data, unless you also want it to simplify the mesh somehow, in which case that should be part of the feature request.
I don’t know whether composition data is even loaded by clients. I can imagine it might be that this is not sent to clients at all and not loaded by servers either on run-time, since the client only ever needs to render and calculate physics on unions, not deconstruct them, and the same for the server. (There is in-game CSG API, but AFAIK this can only build new unions, not deconstruct existing ones)
I would recommend adding more use cases to the thread in case networking is already optimal for unions.
(PS: Please follow the format: How to post a Feature Request)
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This is what I am looking for.
If composition data is not loaded in by the client then I have no need for this feature. This is about loading times between meshes and unions. Although the union triangle count being lower than meshes isn’t a big help to increasing union practicality.
I would use this so I could non-uniformly resize unions like I can MeshParts. But that’s certainly not a good use case for this.
What you really want is for Roblox to optimize more when creating the unions so they have less faces. That’s why they are more memory-intensive than most meshparts. Converting a union to a mesh would literally just make an equally inefficient meshpart.
This is not what I want. It was the composition data as buildthomas said.
I just completely forgot the word for it but I knew Unions store more data than meshes do.
If composition data is not replicated as buildthomas suggested then the really only issue after that point is the reduced poly limit on unions but thats a whole other discussion.
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