Decimating Hardsurface sculpts good practice????

tac0m

I'm working on a hard surface sculpt in zbrush and it's sitting around 14mil polys right now. Bringing that many polys into max will probably cause me some problems.

So if i decimate the meshes a bit and use those to bake as the HP meshes will that cause me baking artifacts or a bad bake?

I brought in a meshes that was 520k and a mesh that was decimated down to 49k and they looked the same. Does texture resolution play a big part in this or not. I assume it probably will to some extent.

Any help or people with experience in this would be greatly appreciated.

disanski

Have not really worked with a lot of hard surface sculpts but it should be the same thing.
I decimate my sculpts all the time before I export them to max. I used to get an artifact when baking my normal map from too decimated mesh but I figured out how to prevent it from doing it (some of the polygons were just coming in max flipped for some reason so if that happens I turn off the smoothing group in max as it comes all in one SG by default and then I have no problems at all and the mesh is so dense turning off the SG does not make any difference and it is the correct way the sculpt displays in Zbrush). Besides that i have never had any problems with decimating sculpts and I do it all the time.
Perhaps this should be under the technical section of the forums.

LMP

You'd have to have at least a 4096x4096 to have enough pixels to have just a pixel per polygon, assuming you could also have a perfect unwrap. so, yeah, you don't really need 14 million polygons for a bake.

crazyfool

decimated meshes should be fine, just check for artifacts as sometimes you might get a few strange normals happen or stretching which will affect your normal map, if that happens just change your decimation percentage slightly until it disappears. Often you have to get it into max/maya to see if somethings weird. Its extremely rare however.

I still much prefer actually modelling stuff in maya/max as opposed to doing it all in Z hehe. Z is far too messy if you have to pass the model on and editing them can be a bitch!!

Zpanzer

crazyfool wrote: »

I still much prefer actually modelling stuff in maya/max as opposed to doing it all in Z hehe. Z is far too messy if you have to pass the model on and editing them can be a bitch!!

Agreed, while Zbrush is awesome for fast prototyping and shape finding, using actual hardsurface sculpts in a pipeline is pure hell :P