Maya paint effects conversion

Oniram

Throwing this question out here for anyone since 2 days of trial and error and researching has come up with nothing. I'm trying to prototype some objects using paint effects in maya, and im using the grass/tree branch etc paint effects that come default with it. I want to convert these to polygons but NOT get the result of whats rendered (the full mesh), but i only want to keep the preview mesh that paint effects uses for the viewport (the tubes). im trying to see if theres a low poly solution to painting, where i can just get some general shapes in and not have to deal with hundreds of thousands of polygons to clean up, and only use the resulting.

Essentially, i want to turn this, into geometry, exactly as it is. 

fade1

mmh. If you use  modify->convert->paint effects to polygon it should convert the viewport mesh 1:1 to polygons(unfortunately to triangulated, no quad convert supported).
I just checked, works fine.

Oniram

that's what i had hoped for but this is my before/after of doing that. What it seems to do is convert the mesh to the rendered version of the mesh, which is different than the viewport version. 

throttlekitty

The top entry for paint effects in the Attribute Editor is Brush Type, change that to Mesh (probably from Paint in your case).