Zbrush Decimation Master not Decimating Mesh!

Stormfreek

Hey guys! Really hit a brick wall when decimating my character so I can bring it into topogun to retopo it from zbrush!

Decimation master has worked flawlessly up to this point, but it seems it isn't having fun with my character atm. My character sits at 30.7 million polygons and I have a set of pictures to illustrate the problem:

Here is the mesh, consisting of 48 subtools:



I now hit pre-process all:



Not sure if this is the norm, but the polys shown on the right, or the final polycount number I want to crunch makes no sense for the overall mesh, it is showing me a preview of that single mesh!

So I chose I want to decimate till 33% of the original polygon count, and this pops up:



I can hit pre-process required subtools and try again, but this endless loop just keeps going on and on.

Here are my decimation settings:



Some more information that may help:

- My zbrush stops responding in both stages; the pre-process and decimation, but picks up after a while, I assume they go to completion in that time.

-Everything has sub division levels and there are no hidden subtools.


And finally if this does not work which would be a shame, is there another method of handling 30 million polygons to create the low poly version of the model? I really assumed decimation master would work for me, thus never looked into another way of dealing with this amount of polygons.

Any ideas why this isn't working?

Thanks so much guys!

EDIT: just wanted to say worse comes worse I will have to merge a few subtools and pre-process individually which seems like a waste of time as this shouldn't be necessary

Stromberg90

Eh, 30 mill and 48 sub-tools seems really high, you might not have enough ram to do the operation.
Also you could step it down in subdivision level then decimate you don't need all the small details to make your lowpoly.

Stormfreek

Stromberg90 wrote: »

Eh, 30 mill and 48 sub-tools seems really high, you might not have enough ram to do the operation.
Also you could step it down in subdivision level then decimate you don't need all the small details to make your lowpoly.

never thought of this good idea, will try now!

Stromberg90

Hope it works

Stormfreek

Stromberg90 wrote: »

Hope it works

Yah I really need to kick myself in the backside, it was an obvious choice, no need to decimate, just reduce the subdivs and export out! Topogun can handle the rest! Thanks man!

cryrid

30 million Total points and 48 subtools shouldn't be too much for a tool, though perhaps too much to try at once. Have you tried only pre-processing and decimating a current tool with default values? Have you tried decimating a different tool such as one of the default projects, to see if this is tool-specific or something more related to your machine in general?

And yeah, don't decimate for retopology; it's better served to crunch down a larger mesh prior to baking so that you don't have to export and import several files that are 1GB+ each. If you have medium res subdivisions, they work just as well for retopology.

Stormfreek

Woop a bit late of a response, and yeah it is far too much to try at once. Decimating one subtool works fine

Thanks for your help guys!