3ds Max - Optimisation of hard surface objects

mawilbolou

Hi 

I have a construction scene that I have to reduce massively in polys.
It has alot of cylindrical poly meshes.

I would like to reduce the huge amounts of polys per cylinder...

So i try the ProOptimizer, Multires and Optimizer.
The results are garbage.

Heres a small part of the scene...

Heres one cylinder totalling 256 polys


Heres an example after calculating...


anybody know how to sort this out or maybe have a suggestion as to what other plugin or software I can use?

any help would be great

Cheers

Macebo

mawilbolou, the ProOptimizer is a really bad choice for generating low poly objects, since it creates a lot of uneven and "ugly" geometry, and this can cause trouble while dificulting the process of unwrapping the model. Since you are using 3ds max, generally people use the freeform tools, inside the graphite modeling tools, to generate a low poly by drawing quads along the high poly surface, while mainating its silhouette. In your case, you can avoid this by creating a basic cilinder and extruding its edge along the whole extension of the high poly.

 The process of drawing polygons along the high poly surface is explained in this tutorial by Arrimus 3d (around the 4:10 mark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vsn_AylMA4

Revel

Depends on how close this thing gonna be from the camera view, I'd say manual work will give you the best result and plus more control over what's get removed..

mawilbolou

@Revel Yeah it's looking like manual is the best way to go. 

I am so surprised that Max can't do simple tasks like this, when the geometry was created in max, and is a simple primitive object.

But thanks for the link @Macebo . I will play with freeform tools. I might not use these techniques for this project but I certainly will use this on future projects.

Cheers

cptSwing

I do fondly remember XSI's mesh reducing tools, would give you mostly quads (from my admittedly limited experience)..

spacefrog

mawilbolou said:

@Revel Yeah it's looking like manual is the best way to go. 

I am so surprised that Max can't do simple tasks like this, when the geometry was created in max, and is a simple primitive object.

But thanks for the link @Macebo . I will play with freeform tools. I might not use these techniques for this project but I certainly will use this on future projects.

Cheers

For the cylinder example where the cap gets seperated from the body:
It's a clear sign that your geometry consists of seperated elements, the cap does'nt share vertices with the body
Prooptimizer got a merge checkbox ( which you have unchecked) which does exactly that for you
Then the cylinder geo should come out perfectly fine. Forget about multires and optimize, they are tools from another century
The retopo reommendation using  the poly drawing tools to rebuild the mesh is no real option if you really got mostly railings, cylinders etc.. If you want final control over your geo in such cases, it's maybe an option to simply use renderable splines to rebuild them, which generate the mesh for you in an adaptive manner

Don't judge tools which obviously provide many options ( like prooptimizer ) too quickly, many of them  reveal their real power only after some time fiddling around . But there are better 3rd party tools out there for poly reduction. I often hear that https://www.simplygon.com/ is the best, but i never tested or have any experience with it ...

mawilbolou

@spacefrog I tried it today, and Yep we are going with Simplygon! Its excellent, 1 click and a huge scene of amazing results