Best Of

It actually runs smoothly even at 28M polys, probably due to the 1 bone = 1 mesh principle (excluding cables). I animated it straight after ZBrush, then reattached textured meshes to bones, but it could actually perform well on a USD import too — it has real-time performance in the viewport on a gaming laptop (i9-14900K, 96 GB RAM) and loads from SSD in seconds.

For the scene without textures it loads around 8 GB of RAM, and about 33 GB in rendered mode. Rendering with 32 ray-tracing samples takes roughly 32 seconds per frame, so overall it behaves surprisingly well.

Here’s the animated version and breakdown if you’re interested:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QK0OoB

Hey everyone,

Just wrapped up this high-poly mechanoid sculpt — around 28 million tris and 462 bones.

Main concept: The Mechanid Suit is an advanced fusion-tech combat system wielded by alien warriors during their invasion of Earth. It represents the aliens’ drive to merge their fusion technology with human engineering, pushing both to new extremes.

Aside from the concepting task, the goal was to test whether a high-poly mesh can be used directly for animation and rigging, skipping traditional retopology and manual UVs.

So far, it seems absolutely possible with the right optimizations and workflow management. I’ve put together a breakdown and animation test here:
ArtStation Breakdown & Animation Test

And here’s the link to the original concept and full breakdowns:
Original Concept & Breakdowns

The setup uses auto-generated UVs, a USD-based texturing workflow, and some custom Python automation for production tasks.

Would love to hear your thoughts — especially from anyone who’s experimented with high-density rigs or USD animation pipelines.