EDIT: Can this be moved to Troubleshooting assets… or some more appropriate place?
Need insight from those who know:
I have seen some discussions on mesh creation and proper ways of handling it. However, for simplicity’s sake, I was considering an alternate method of character creation.
What are the pro’s and con’s of using multiple meshes as apposed to a single mesh?
I have no issues creating a single mesh and animating it, however… re-purposing that mesh to create a different character (say, male instead of female) becomes problematic and time consuming fixing vertex grouping and animations.
On the other hand, if the left thigh/buttock was a single mesh, attached to the thigh bone… scaling and altering animations becomes SIMPLE!
Sooo… the real question is:
Considering that all meshes are extremely LOW polygon count, how does JME respond to a single mesh with a higher polygon count as apposed to multiple meshes with a much smaller polygon count?
Where am I going to hit limitations faster? In object count? or vertex/polygon count?
I’d love to know, as animation of a single flexible mesh character, compared to a jointed multiple mesh character… really doesn’t have that much of an impact on the overall look/effect the character models produce for the game. It really comes down to limitations of rendering when you consider 100 players all running around in the same general area.
Sorry for the addition… but another consideration is ease of customizing the look of one female human to another female human.
Also, as for textures, this method creates the added overhead of multiple textures… though they would be much smaller in dimensions to produce the same level of detail. Anyways… afterthoughts. Still wondering about the initial questions. 
The more you can get away with batching the better. Lots of single tiny objects bog down the engine. It’s to the point where if you want lots of animated characters people are even looking into batching many characters into a single mesh and how to still animate them separately.
So try to have as few objects as you can get away with, really.
@pspeed Stupid question… how does this effect the UV mapping of meshes with different images? Once they become a single mesh, is it still possible to use multiple textures, etc? I can think of a few instances where this would be ultra advantageous… even with how I am dealing with models now (single mesh).
You have to use something like a texture atlas if you want to merge meshes with different textures. JME recently got some texture atlasing utils so it’s easier than it used to be.
Thanks!