High poly to Low poly workflow problem question

Heart Murmer

Hey guy's I'm fairly new with sub-d and I have run into a problem I can't figure out. I scuplted my mesh in mudbox for all the organics on my guy, because previous attempts to do the hard surface in mudbox was a disaster and frustrating. So I planned on doing the organics then transferring the mesh from mudbox to max 8, doing the hard surfacing, then baking the texture to a low poly. Well the mesh I'm trying to transfer from mudbox hits around 2 million polygons, and max runs out of memory like 10 seconds into importing the .obj. One thing I'm curious about is if I'm doing this process all wrong and maybe I should start over. Or if there is maybe another program I should try for better sub-d, I heard XSI is pretty good. How would you guy's go about this?

System specs for memory sake:

1gb Ram
80 HD
Nvidia Geforce 7600GT
AMD Athlon 64x 4200+

Thanks!

Rob Galanakis

Just export a much lower-poly version of your model (a couple hundred thousand tris will do... if you have a 2 million poly mesh, try the 250k version, I wouldn't do higher). BTW, I would get some more RAM if you are going to do more sculpting. The error msg you are getting is because you are running out of RAM (zbrush wouldn't even let you export... Mudbox allows you because it uses the HDD). Try xNormal (thread in this forum) to get your actual normal maps.

snap.crackle.pop

Same thing for me, 3ds max tends to shake beyond the 1.5 million poly bar for everyone factory default, so more ram is your friend. And also notice that Mudbox files are sometimes 120 megs, which means that every bit is sealed on your HHD and not cloging your Virtual mem.

have fun

Mark Dygert

Remember that each time you Subdivide you are doubling your poly count. Your next level down is half has dense as your highest. Try not to Sub-D the entire thing just to get the resolution you need in one area, instead Sub-D just that area.

Just because Mudbox handles a high amount of polys and an easy to learn interface but it doesn't mean we toss out our polysense to the wind and get stupid/sloppy. You still need to sculpt smartly.

shadows

I don't know if you can do this in mudbox, you should be able to.
But with zbrush the workflow is pretty simple, you can get any mesh into max without any problems. But you will need polygon cruncher or something similar.
Take your mesh and export it into chunks of 300k-800k depending on what your pc can handle, you will know when you polycrunch them if your pc runs out of memory go with smaller chunks.
Then you should be able to polycrunch them by about 50%/75% without loosing any of the details that your mesh has.
Import those meshes into max or xnormal or whichever app you use and it should be fine.

Also you should think about getting more ram, atleast 1gb more. That should help you too.

StJoris

Vig, doesn't the polycount quadruple each time you subdivide instead of double?

Psyk0

What shadows said. Max 9 didnt seem to mind a 2 million mesh on my shit kickin computer: P3 1Ghz w/512MB RAM :O. Just curious, are you running XP? if so that thing is a real memory hog lol.

...and yes mudbox quadruples the count at each level.

Heart Murmer

Thanks for the replies guys, what I'm doing right now is Hard Surfacing around a 400k poly version, which works fine.

@Professor420 - That xnormal looks very interesting thanks for the tip, it will probably save me a lot of head ache.

@vig - Yeah I think I got ahead of myself with the program, it's fairly new to me. It all comes with experience I guess.

@Psyk0 - Yeah I'm running XP, is there a better OS for this? Vista?

Psyk0

Bah XP should be fine, it's based on win2k anyway, i just find it odd that you'd get out of memory error with 1 gig.

It could be the way XP is managing the memory.

As for vista i'm staying away from it as long as possible.