Hi! All, I'm modeling some character and architectures in 3ds max 9 for my games. But I have seen some guys made models like one big mesh. Thats one human character in one big mesh. Now, I'm working on a tree model. I was wondering, would I merge leafs with the body or keep them separate and made a group. What do you think? Which one would be good?

Whats important is how they are stored in memory. '.3ds' files store one group per material, so you will want to load them into another structure, such as an octree or quadtree. However, it depends on how many tris' we are talking about, character meshes are usually very concentrated, i.e. the character is quite small and the triangles are also very numerous, a couple thousand within a small area. As a result, it is efficient to pass the entire character to the renderer instead. I'm currently using a single trimesh for each character, and a bounding volume hierarchy for the level geometry. (i.e. each node has a series of child nodes and a bounding box that covers the bounding boxes of each child, and the leaf nodes each have a single vertex array.)

this might help, read it all :)

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=112189