How To I Optimize Collision Meshes

[AuroraLily]

I'm working on some meshes to make statues of the vanilla oblivion creatures and races.

 

I've got the static meshes of my statues and used 2 different methods to create a collision mesh for them but came up with exactly the same result.

 

Technically it worked - i created a statue of an imp and an imperial that you can't walk through. My problem is that in game if you get too close to the statues oblivion slows to a crawl and in the case of the imperial completely stops responding.

 

The methods I used for creating the collision meshes were:

1. Following the adding collision model tutorial on the construction set wiki.

2. Made a no material/texture copy of the statue, and used blender to turn it into a collision mesh.

 

I tried to optimise the meshes using gmax but it crashed as soon as i tried to export it.

 

I'm going to do a clean install of all the programs I used as I noticed when typing this thread that some of my versions are newer to those suggested for use on vista (which I believe is advised againt)

 

My question is - how do I optimise the collision meshes so they don't cripple my game?

 

Aurora x

[Lanceor]

I'm no modeler and I don't even know how to use Blender, but a trick that works for me is to use NifSkope.

 

If the mesh has only one NiTriStrips branch, you can click on the mesh, click on Havok > Create Convex Shape and adjust the roundoff to the largest number that more or less represents the mesh.

 

I'm sure a Blender user will come along and suggest a more elegant solution though. :)