Mesh Reduce/Paint Weights tool in 3ds max?

Stu2Prof

Hi guys

I'm currently getting back to 3ds Max after a year of studying Maya at University. I've got a mesh already UV-ed with a ridiculously high polycount. If I was in Maya I would use Poly Reduce and Paint Weights tool to get a nice simple mesh. Any chance there is something similar in 3ds Max?

Mark Dygert

Not out of the box. The process is much more manual and a lot more complicated and it's usually better/easier to build a lower poly version by hand. 3dsmax's ProOptimizer works pretty well, it can preserve materials and UVs and does a good job of letting you dial it

I would explore using Simplygon's remesher reduction feature, especially now that its free. Its a stand alone app that does reduction, usually for LODs but it works mostly how you describe. You can paint areas for it to preserve and then have it reduce and remesh while preserving skin weights, textures, normals and selected/painted edges and verts. It's great at making skeletal mesh LODs for Unreal and it would be pretty good in this case too.   

Stu2Prof

Thanks Mark. A friend of mine suggested that the other day but I didnt know you could paint in areas you wanted to keep. I tried out the remesh function but Im dealing with a lot of hard edge cad data and the remesh just seems to give uneven triangles and break the edges. Do you know of any tutorials for Simplygon?

Mark Dygert

They have a few in the documentation on their site. You have to log in to see it all though.

Yea, Simplygon like almost all simplification tools works on tris only and won't preserve quads or edge flow. I would give my left nut for decent quad-optimizer.