Author Hi Gamedev! :DSo I'm using some existing models from other games for a PRIVATE mod im working on (so no restributing, don't wanna rip of talented artists and using existing meshes form games due to cost). But when i import them into blender or 3ds max the modeling software tells me it's got overlapping vertices. Is this normal with game models or is every vertex supposed to be welded?Kind regards! Maybe. They might not be duplicates, it could be that there was additional information which was lost, such as two points that had different normal information or texture coordinates even though they're at the same position.It could be normal for that project, but no, in general duplicate verts, overlapping verts, degenerate triangles, and similar can cause rendering issues and are often flagged by tools.  If it is something you extracted it might be the result of processing that took place rather than coming from the original, like a script that ends up stripping the non-duplicate information or that ends up traversing a mesh more than once.Most likely your warning is exactly the same one artists in the game would receive, and they just need to be welded, fused, or otherwise processed back into place. Advertisement It's normal. Reasons to split a mesh edge of geometrically adjacent triangles are:Differing materials / textures / uv coordsEdge should show discontinutiy in lighting (e.g. cube) instead smooth shading (e.g. sphere)Dividing mesh into smaller pieces for fine grained cullingThus, splitting models and duplicating vertices is a post process necessary to use them in game engines, while artists keep the original models to do changes and for archivation.Turning such assets back to editable models requires welding with a tolerance of zero, or eventually a very small number. Issues might still remain. Other things, e.g. the original cage of a subdivision model, or Nurbs control points, etc. can't be reconstructed that easily. Author Hi Guy's so i usually use this tutorial if i get overlapping:The reason im asking this is because: Does it matter if faces are welded or not if i convert them to meshlets like Nvidias asteroids? Or should they still be welded then?Does it matter how small/large the mesh is when welding by distance?Kind regards! That is another “it depends on the details” question. There might be visual artifacts or not, depending on the details. There can be performance differences depending on the details. There are reasons to do it that we're already covered, a vertex can have far more than just position data which would make them different despite both being at the same location. There are details and choices beyond just the vertex positions overlapping.  Newgamemodder said:Does it matter if faces are welded or not if i convert them to meshlets like Nvidias asteroids?Usually no. You need to regenerate the meshlets anyway after editing a model. It's done by a preprocessing tool, and the usual asset pipeline is: Model from artist → automated tool to split edges where needed to get one mesh per material, compute meshlet clusters, quantization for compression, reorder vertices for cache efficiency, etc → save as asset to ship with the game.So meshlets do not add to the risks from welding vertices which you already have (e.g. accidental corruption of UV coordinates or merging of material groups). Artwork is not affected from meshlets in general.However, this applies to games production, not to modding. Things like Nanite and meshlets ofc. make it even harder to mod existing assets, since modders don't have those automated preprocessing tools if devs don't provide them.Newgamemodder said:Does it matter how small/large the mesh is when welding by distance?Yes. Usually you give a distance threshold for the welding, so the scale of the model matters. My advise is to use the smallest threshold possible and observing UVs, which should not change from the welding operation. 

A film adaptation of hit video game “Split Fiction” starring Sydney Sweeney and directed by Jon M. Chu has landed at Amazon MGM Studios, Variety has confirmed. As Variety first reported last month, along with the news of Sweeney’s casting (the actress signed on to the project March 6, the day the game launched) and Chu directing, the script for the movie is being written by “Deadpool & Wolverine” screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Related Stories From developer Hazelight Studios and publisher Electronic Arts, “Split Fiction” blends fantasy and science fiction, following a pair of authors, Mio and Zoe, who become trapped in the worlds they wrote. Written by director and Hazelight studio chief Josef Fares and Sebastian Johansson, “Split Fiction” is a co-op adventure game that features gameplay mechanics involving split-screen combat, platforming challenges and differing abilities for each character. Popular on Variety The “Split Fiction” film will be produced by Mike Goldberg and Dmitri M. Johnson’s Story Kitchen (formerly dj2 Entertainment) and Chu’s Electric Somewhere. Sweeney, Story Kitchen’s Timothy I. Stevenson, and Hazelight Studios’ founder Josef Fares and COO Oskar Wolontis are executive producing. “Even in early development here at Hazelight, it was clear how much potential ‘Split Fiction’ had to become a kick-ass movie,” Wolontis told Variety Monday. “We now know it’s got a shot at becoming something truly special with such an amazing creative team behind it. Jon M. Chu, Sydney Sweeney, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, together with Story Kitchen, have all been champions and true fans of this project since day one, and we can’t wait to see their vision for this movie come to life! Amazon MGM has shown intense interest in this project and we’re happy to see them show both confidence and clear intent to bring this movie to all current and future fans of ‘Split Fiction’ out there. We look forward to holding them to that and working together to bring Mio and Zoe to screen.” It has yet to be decided whether Sweeney will be playing Zoe or Mio, and the film is actively looking to cast her co-star. Released March 6, “Split Fiction” quickly became a hit with players and critics alike, receiving positive reviews and massive sales. According to Hazelight, the game sold more than two million copies in the first week following its launch, and that number continues to rise at a rapid clip. Variety first reported the “Split Fiction” film was in the works, and attracting top Hollywood studios for a bidding war, during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March. “Split Fiction” marks the third film adaptation Hazelight has set up with Story Kitchen, following projects in development based on games “It Takes Two” (also at Amazon MGM Studios and counting Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks as producer) and “A Way Out.”

Microsoft and Google are taking distinctive approaches with AI agents in their productivity suites, and enterprises need to account for the differences when formulating digital labor strategies, analysts said. In recent months, both companies have announced a dizzying array of new agents aimed at extracting value from corporate documents and maximizing efficiency. The tech giants have dropped numerous hints about where they’re headed with AI agents in their respective office suites, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Microsoft is reshaping its Copilot assistant as a series of tools to create, tap into, and act on insights at individual and organizational levels. The Microsoft 365 roadmap lists hundreds of specialized AI tools under development to automate work for functions such as HR and accounting. The company is also developing smaller AI models to carry out specific functions. Google is going the opposite way, with its large-language model Gemini at the heart of Workspace. Google offers tools that include Gems for workers to create simple custom agents that automate tasks such as customer service, and Agentspace in Google Cloud to build more complex custom agents for collaboration and workflow management. At the recent Google I/O developer conference, the company added real-time speech translation to Google Meet. “For both, the goal is to bring usable and practical productivity and efficiency capabilities to work tools,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. But the differing AI agent strategies are heavily rooted in each company’s philosophical approaches to productivity. Although Microsoft has long encouraged customers to move from its traditional “perpetual-license” Office suite to the Microsoft 365 subscription-based model, M365 notably retains the familiar desktop apps. Google Workspace, on the other hand, has always been cloud-based. Microsoft users are typically a bit more tethered to traditional enterprise work styles, while Google has always been the “cloud-first darling for smaller organizations that still crave real-time collaboration,” Miller said. When it comes to the generative AI models being integrated into the two office suites, “Google’s Gemini models are beating out the models being deployed by Microsoft,” Miller said. “But as Microsoft expands its model ‘inventory’ in use across M365, this could change.” Microsoft has an advantage, as many desktop users live in Outlook or Word. The intelligence Copilot can bring from CRM software is readily available, while that integration is more complex in the cloud-native Google Workspace. “Microsoft still has an edge in a foundational understanding of work and the capacity to extend Copilot connections across applications as expansive as the Office suite through to Dynamics, giving AI a greater opportunity to be present in the spaces and presentation layers where workers enjoy working,” Miller said. Microsoft’s Copilot Agents and Google’s Gems and Agentspace are in their early stages, but there have been positive developments, said J.P. Gownder, a vice president and principal analyst on Forrester’s Future of Work team. Microsoft recently adopted Google’s A2A protocol, which makes it easier for users of both productivity suites to collaborate and unlock value from stagnant data sitting on other platforms. “That should be a win for interoperability,” Gownder said. But most companies that are Microsoft shops have years or decades of digital assets that hold them back from considering Google, he said. For example, Excel macros, pivot tables, and customizations cannot be easily or automatically migrated to Google Sheets, he said. “As early as this market is, I don’t think it’s fair to rank either player — Microsoft or Google — as being the leader; both of them are constructing new ecosystems to support the growth of agentic AI,” Gownder said. Most Microsoft Office users have moved to M365, but AI is helping Google is making inroads into larger organizations, especially among enterprises that are newer and less oriented toward legacy Microsoft products, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. Technologies like A2A blur the line between on-premises and cloud productivity. As a result, “Google Workspace is no longer perceived as inferior, as it had been in the past,” Gold said. And for budget-constrained enterprises, the value of AI agent features is not the only consideration. “There is also the cost equation at work here, as Google seems to have a much more transparent cost structure than Microsoft with all of its user classes and discounts,” Gold said. Microsoft does not include Copilot in its M365 subscriptions, which vary in price depending on the type of customer. The Copilot business subscriptions range from $30 per user per month for M365 Copilot to $200 per month for 25,000 messages for Copilot Studio, which is also available under a pay-as-you-go model. Google has flat subscription pricing for Workspace, starting at $14 per user per month for business plans with Gemini included.

The Fearsome Megalodon Ate Basically Whatever It Wanted to Reach Its Daily 100,000-Calorie Need, Study Suggests Scientists previously assumed the giant, prehistoric sharks mostly feasted on whales, but it turns out they probably weren’t so picky An artistic reconstruction of the extinct megalodon. Scientists' ideas about how the megalodon looked are based on its fossilized teeth. Hugo Saláis via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0 Between 3 million and 20 million years ago, the largest predatory fish ever known hunted in Earth’s oceans. Called theOtodus megalodon), this giant shark grew up to 79 feet long, had teeth the size of human hands and could bite with the strength of an industrial hydraulic press. But what scientists know about the extinct creature has been almost entirely determined from fossil teeth—since paleontologists have yet to discover a complete megalodon, and the animals’ cartilaginous skeletons don’t preserve well. Now, new research on the mineral content of their teeth suggests megalodons ate pretty much whatever they wanted. Until recently, scientists assumed that megalodons satisfied their estimated 100,000-calorie daily needs by mostly eating whales. A study published Monday in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, however, suggests the prehistoric shark had a much more diverse diet than previously thought—akin to the great white shark’s “if it moves, it’s food” hunting strategy of today, writes Vice’s Ashley Fike. Jeremy McCormack with a fossilized megalodon tooth. Uwe Dettmar for Goethe University An international team of researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing the ratio of different variants, called isotopes, of the mineral zinc in 18-million-year-old megalodon teeth. Animals absorb zinc only through food, so this could offer a hint to their diets. Muscles and organs absorb more of the isotope zinc-64 than zinc-66, meaning that the higher up the food chain an animal is—or the more meat and fish it eats—the less zinc-66 it absorbs, and its ratio of zinc-66 to zinc-64 is lower, in turn. “Since we don’t know how the ratio of the two zinc isotopes at the bottom of the food pyramid was at that time, we compared the teeth of various prehistoric and extant shark species with each other and with other animal species. This enabled us to gain an impression of predator-prey relationships 18 million years ago,” Jeremy McCormack, a scientist from Goethe University Frankfurt and lead author of the study, says in a statement. Unsurprisingly, the isotope ratios in the teeth put the megalodon at the top of the food chain, alongside close shark relatives such as Otodus chubutensis. At the same time, however, the scientists noticed there wasn’t a huge difference between the megalodon and the lower-tiered animals, suggesting the sharks feasted on creatures from all rungs of the ladder. “They were not concentrating on certain prey types, but they must have fed throughout the food web, on many different species,” McCormack tells CNN’s Jacopo Prisco. “While certainly this was a fierce apex predator, and no one else would probably prey on an adult megalodon, it’s clear that they themselves could potentially feed on almost everything else that swam around.” The results also indicate that megalodon populations living in different habitats had slightly contrasting diets, potentially because of differing prey availability. More broadly, the study invites comparisons between the megalodon and its iconic extant relative, the great white shark. These comparisons, however, may have previously led to some overreaching assumptions. “Previous studies simply assumed that megalodon must have looked like a gigantic version of the modern great white shark without any evidence,” Kenshu Shimada, a vertebrate paleontologist at DePaul University and co-author of the new study, told National Geographic’s Jason Bittel back in March. He and colleagues had just published a different paper that reassessed the prehistoric shark’s size, suggesting that it had a more slender body than its smaller, modern cousin. The new study thus joins a host of research challenging widely held ideas about megalodons and their relatives, says Alberto Collareta, a paleontologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who was not involved in the research, to CNN. “These have led us to abandon traditional reconstruction of the megatooth sharks as ‘inflated’ versions of the modern white shark. We now know that the megalodon was something else—in terms of size, shape and ancestry, and of biology, too,” he adds. In fact, with both species eating generalist diets, great white sharks might have outcompeted megalodons for food and ultimately played a role in their demise. “Even ‘supercarnivores’ are not immune to extinction,” Shimada says in the statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

To match or not to match? That is the question that plagues homeowners the world over. A certain degree of matching is expected and should be prioritized for a cohesive palette—designers always emphasize that a home should be “in conversation” with itself. But how far does that matchy-matchy mentality really need to go? Recently, homeowners and design lovers on Reddit have debated one specific match, and it has the internet divided: Should you match the tile of your kitchen backsplash to your bathroom tile? To get to the bottom of it, we spoke with designers and, well, the answer might surprise you. For More on Kitchens:Should Your Kitchen and Bathroom Tile Match?In short, probably not. While there is no hard-and-fast rule, all the designers I spoke with said they would not match them unless they were intentionally going for a wholly cohesive look. “Rarely would I match a kitchen and bathroom tile, or use the same tile in both places,” says designer and pro-renovator Christina Salway. “There are just too many beautiful options to do the same thing twice.” Designer Amanda Lantz echoed Christina’s sentiment: “The options of tile are so endless that I love giving each room its own character by changing it up in some way.” For More on Bathrooms:What Should You Do Instead?If you like a cohesive look but don’t want to match, take Amanda's advice: “Lean into the differing textures, but stay in the same color palette,” she says. “It brings enough variation to make it interesting and give each space some personality.” If you prefer something that feels more organic, focus on crafting a diverse palette. “Frequently, people think of a room as an isolated experience, but I like to think about how a person moves through a house,” says Christina. “You have to weave the colors from one room into the next.” Designer Annie Downing agrees, suggesting that you shouldn’t get too hung up on exact matches and instead focus on the common language they share. “Tile [all through a house] should feel like it’s from the same family, even if the patterns, colors, or materials vary slightly,” she says. This can feel like pulling at threads, but it’s ultimately the most rewarding way to craft a colorful home that feels wholly unique to you. If you’re worried about the space feeling overwhelmed with color, don’t. There’s an easy fix. “You can always tone a bathroom down with white paint and a white shower curtain, but tile is a marvelous opportunity to choose something that really enlivens the space and makes it yours,” says Christina. “Don’t panic and just go all white unless that’s what makes your heart sing!” For More on Tile:Anna LoganSenior Homes & Style EditorAnna Logan is the Senior Homes & Style Editor at Country Living, where she has been covering all things home design, including sharing exclusive looks at beautifully designed country kitchens, producing home features, writing everything from timely trend reports on the latest viral aesthetic to expert-driven explainers on must-read topics, and rounding up pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted to know about paint, since 2021. Anna has spent the last seven years covering every aspect of the design industry, previously having written for Traditional Home, One Kings Lane, House Beautiful, and Frederic. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia. When she’s not working, Anna can either be found digging around her flower garden or through the dusty shelves of an antique shop. Follow her adventures, or, more importantly, those of her three-year-old Maltese and official Country Living Pet Lab tester, Teddy, on Instagram.