Mechanoid exo suit completed

jozin

Hey everyone,

Just wrapped up this high-poly mechanoid sculpt — around 28 million tris and 462 bones.
The goal aside concepting task was to test whether a high-poly mesh can be used directly for animation and rigging, skipping traditional retopo and manual UVs.

So far, it seems absolutely possible with the right optimizations and workflow management.
I’ve put together a breakdown and animation test here:  https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QK0OoB

Also here is the link to origibal concept and all breakdowns:  https://www.artstation.com/artwork/P6BR31

The setup uses auto-generated UVs, a USD-based texturing workflow, and some custom Python automation for production tasks.

Would love to hear your thoughts — especially from anyone who’s experimented with high-density rigs or USD animation pipelines.

jozin

Eric Chadwick

20m seems way excessive to me. How does it work in the viewport for an animator who is trying to animate a specific shot? Can they get interactive feedback and quick playblasts of their work as they refine it? Also how does this complexity affect loading and saving times? Rendering times? CPU and RAM usage? All of these are important considerations for a technical artist working in a team environment, where your models and rigs need to be utilized by others in the team.

jozin

It actually runs smoothly even at 28M polys, probably due to the 1 bone = 1 mesh principle (excluding cables). I animated it straight after ZBrush, then reattached textured meshes to bones, but it could actually perform well on a USD import too — it has real-time performance in the viewport on a gaming laptop (i9-14900K, 96 GB RAM) and loads from SSD in seconds.

For the scene without textures it loads around 8 GB of RAM, and about 33 GB in rendered mode. Rendering with 32 ray-tracing samples takes roughly 32 seconds per frame, so overall it behaves surprisingly well.

Here’s the animated version and breakdown if you’re interested:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QK0OoB