Use meshlabs or by hand?

Makkyo

I'm making some pavement pieces for my scene. Here is an example of the references im following.



Most of the paving slabs are quite rough with the edges heavily sculpted, how would you go about creating a low poly version of these, and ones similar, is it okay to use mesh labs in this case? or is it better to create the lowpoly by hand? (keeping in mind i have broken and cracked edges too).

Nosslak

I would just import the lowest subdivision level from ZBrush or whatever and manually optimize that (presuming you can get a lowres mesh back, otherwise just the base mesh). A bit obvious but I'd also import the midpoly version of the sculpt and use that as reference for the new optimized mesh so that it'll still match the HP.

AtticusMars

Test it.
Run your model through mesh labs and see if the result looks efficient

Joshua Stubbles

There are many ways of doing it. You need to test multiple ones and see which gives you the best results in the least amount of time.