flexible Low Poly Counts - Workflow - Is there a way???

EliderDeli

Good Morning,

I would love to get some generel Tipps to the Topic "flexible Low Poly Counts". To clearify I try to find a good Workflow to go from a HighPoly Geometry to different Low Poly Geometries (different in Polycount). Each of the Low Poly Geometries is optimized for another Engine. So for Example in the End we have on Low Poly Geometry with 100.000 polys one wit 50.000 and one with 150.000. Reducing tools like "Decimator" are ways to ungood and the Polyflow should be still nice. So at the moment I would create Three Versions is there a better way?

Any help would be really nice
Greeting Eli

gnoop

I think you are looking for an automatic LOD generator.    Multi-res  in 3dmax , Decimate in Blender, Maya has something too. As well as a few game engines themselves.       But Imo neither of them work perfectly right  to have a perfect polyflow and no shading artifacts.  Thus manual retopology tools are so common. 
 Those tools works sometimes okish  on characters and complex organic things  but definitely not on hard surface mechanisms and simple shape ,box like items.  Especially with edited vertex normals.    Still could be used to some extent paired with attribute transfer/normal theft  kind of things

In our age of artificial intellect and neural networks  I don't understand too why it couldn't be perfectly automatic.  Hope I might be missing  some cool new LOD tool . 

Steamy_Steve

Total beginner, here, but I find ZBrush's ZRemesher, paired with the ZRemesher Guides brush, does a more than decent work.

Mark Dygert

https://www.simplygon.com/  Simplygon is probably your best automated solution. It works on skinned meshes and will even crunch joints. Allowing it to remesh/bake your LOD's gives you amazing performance boosts with fantastic quality. They have been the defacto best solution but in the past they where expensive. However, since MS bought them to boost their VR business Simplygon is "free", so well worth it to check it out. 

http://www.instalod.com/  Instalod is a close second. The automation you can set up is helpful and rendering foliage to impostors is a great tool. But you can set that up on your own with a bit of scripting in Max or Maya, even Unreal with a bit of blueprint and render targets.

Doing it by hand seems tedious and annoying. It would take 10x longer and probably be less flexible if you wanted to make a simple change, like crunch everything 10% more or less. Doing that by hand would mean days of work if not weeks on top of all the time you spent making the lods. I wouldn't go that route unless you where forced to by some ridiculous constraint...

EliderDeli

@ Steamy Thanks a lot for the Tipp !! but I allready tried the Zremesher and the Quality in hard surface Low Poly Objects with Reflections was not good enough (<70.000 for complex Low Poly Models). In the End the Correcton Time was sligthly Higher then doing it by hand.   

@Mark - Wow thanks a lot for your tipps I will check them out.
There are a few Polycounts I cant get over so I have to check If the two Tools will help. 

Greetings Eli