How to create a mesh that appears to be multiple separate parts & skeletal animation.

NOTE: This example uses only solid colors for each “segment” of the mesh.

1. Create a new mesh (cube in the example).

2. Create another mesh.

3. Let’s add some materials so we can easily differentiate the 2 meshes. Do this by creating a material slot and assigning the relevant vertices to that material.

4. Now, prepare for skeletal animations, while maintaining a minimal mesh count. Let’s set up vertex groups. Create a vertex group and similar to the material, make sure you assign the relevant vertices to that group.

NOTE: The vertex group name will be relevant to the Bone names later

5. Once we have the vertex groups, we can now merge these two meshes together.

6. We want to keep the number of meshes/materials to a minimum. We can either bake or author a texture to achieve the same result as above. In this case, we will create a new material slot to start.

7. Now set up the texture, in this case, we only have 2 solid colors, so we can do a 2 x 1 image. You’ll need to determine your own needs as per your creative direction.

8. In our case, we set up the UVs to use one pixel per “cube”. We can utilize the material slots to select the relevant vertices for UV unwrapping

NOTE: if you are baking the textures, you’ll need to properly set up your UVs to get a good baking result.

9. After we unwrap the UVs, we can scale them down and move them to the side to use 1 of the 2 pixels

NOTE: this is only relevant in this case. If you are baking you need to use proper UVing which is outside of the scope of this tutorial.

10. Repeat for the other segment.

11. We can use Blender’s Texture Paint to draw that 2x1 image. First, select the correct image from the picker, then resize the drawing circle to 1px, set the color, and paint. Then we can save it.