Viability of decimated meshes.

Maxilator

Hi, I have a question on what you think of this, I've played around with using decimation in zbrush to make low poly meshes and for some shapes it seems to work really well, Is there any good reason to not use it in game for shapes that are forgiving when it comes to topology? It sometimes feels like I'm cheating but it saves a bunch if time and as long as the mesh doesn't deform I cant really find a reason not to use it. And yes, I know the uv's are harder to get right with these meshes but the time you spend extra on this I find is less than what you would spend on making a proper topology I find.

Torch

Why not use Zremesher if you want more quadded, clean topo? I guess decimating something like rocks and stuff would work, but wouldn't you then have to worry about f'd up smoothing groups, that kinda thing? 

Maxilator

Torch said:

Why not use Zremesher if you want more quadded, clean topo? I guess decimating something like rocks and stuff would work, but wouldn't you then have to worry about f'd up smoothing groups, that kinda thing? 

I've tried zremesher too, but I think it fucks too much with the silhouette and doesn't really handle too well when you want a really low poly count, especially rocks and stuff like that that I'm talking about I don't find it being too good for. As far as normals go I find them serviceable as long as I make sure to properly harden the uv islands.

musashidan

If you're getting good end results and find the retop vs unwrap tradeoff is paying dividends then why not? You can always do some manual optimisation and edge/shading cleanup. As long as you are still confident that when required, you will have no difficulty with manually retoping future assets then I really don't see an issue.

Zremesh, as you've discovered, will not do nearly as good a job as Decimation, especially for hard-surface, unless you spend some time assigning polygroups to retain harsh silhouette changes/corners/90 degree angles/etc.

poopipe

I've used automatic reducers pretty successfully on a variety of organic shaped objects (rocks etc.)  - Most of them seem to behave pretty much the same way - Zbrush is amongst the most flexible I've tried.  You usually need to go in and clean up a bit after but I've got no qualms about using the results in production.

These tools tend to fall down on mechanical/hard surface objects or if you want to start hitting very low tri-counts but as said above - if the result is fit for purpose then go for it.