best way to lower ploycount?

deemccabe

hi there, i have a high poly tank model and a low poly version of it. the treads on the tank on the low poly version are coming out at like 70,000 polys after me removing all unnessasasy verts, which i know is way to high. does anyone have any creative solutions to lowering the poly count at all without ruining the high to low bake?? also the whole low poly tank comes out at 140,000 polys. is that high by today's standards?? any help would be much appreciated. Thanks


David

Fuiosg

140,000 is a bit much, you need to put some of that detail into your texture maps.

Instead of mutilating it, I would consider starting over and retopo the hi-poly, with more discipline on what needs to be there. Remember-- with the lowpoly you're basically building a silhouette, everything else can be put into maps.

Michael_Ingrassia

without an image its hard to advise. 140,000 sounds like 4x what would be required if professionally modeled. show an image of the overall model and one of just a tank tread (with wireframes highlighted)

Tits

Could help to share an image of the model so we have a better idea of the complexity of the model and the level of details and better suggest you.
140k tri is definitly kind of high, even by today standard.
Depending on how low you want to bring this it might not be possible for you to only cut down the polycount without having to rebake at the very least.
Depending on how the mesh is you can count polycount by going through the model and collapsing rings through the whole model while still trying to keep everything uniform.
Otherwise a good way (and probably cleaner depending of your model) would be to straight up retopologise, re-uv and rebake.

poopipe

I get the impression from the OP that each of the track segments exists in the low res model - that'll be the first problem to resolve cos even if they're simple boxes you're still looking at hundreds of objects 

I'd suggest you bake the track down to a strip shaped bit of geometry and then see where you are. 

For the rest of it, the important thing to maintain is sillhouette. I often put a fully emissive shader on an object , orbit around it and remove anything that doesn't stick out.  Other times I'll just build a cheap model from scratch rather than try to strip loops out. 

At this point in time there don't seem to be any really effective automatic LODders for hard surface assets - you can do rapid prototyping pretty effectively but the results aren't a patch on what an artist can achieve by hand. 

.Wiki

In War Thunder they have a nice technique for the tank tracks which is a more advanced version of the "scrolling uv"-tank track.

http://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Creating_a_3D_tank_model#Tracks

deemccabe

Thanks very much for the response everyone, i really appreciate it. i have attached a few different pictures of what i have so far to give you a better idea of the piece im working on.

deemccabe

after posting these pics i did some retypology on the low poly version and got it down to 50,000 polys without taking away to much detail, which is a big improvement. i simplified the treads alot and went layer by layer deleting all the back face's that arent really visable. do you think 50k is low enough by todays standerd for games or should i take it down any further?? 

Michael_Ingrassia

You could create a simplified cylinder "wheel" and normal map the front details. that would save at least 5-10k polys, or you can save a lot of polys by normal mapping the inner "round" gears to the tank base. Chances are the gamer will never see those gears up close anyway. That would cut your entire poly count probably by half. Also all those small details on the front hood can probably be normal mapped onto geometry "strips" that would knock off an additional 5-10K polys.
But honestly, that is a very nice, clean game model- nice work!

Michael_Ingrassia

Just came across this. Your current tank mesh is very similar in polycount.
http://polycount.com/discussion/178044

deemccabe

thanks for the comments, i really appreciate it.