For free? Bloody good. It's very easy to use, and produces good quality results. It would be usable for a production pipeline, which I think says it all.
Polycruncher may produce slightly better optimisations, and with more control, but that costs money, which immediately puts it out of many people's brackets.
That sounds amazing. I was following some eat3d tutorial.. up until he threw his model into polycruncher. Maybe I can continue on it now I'll have to check that out.
At www.mootools.com they have a version of their 3d Photo Browser that includes Polycruncher. You could run it standalone before you import the mesh into Maya. It's not free but it's a work around for not having a Maya native version.
There is no undo. One of the downsides of a free app. Hopefully they will put that sort of thing in with the next release (if they are still working on it).
What are the sort of 'safe' poly limits for polycruncher? I've gotten a few crashes with the 3d photo browser/standalone version, but I'm not sure if I'm just expecting too much from the software, or if the standalone version just can't cope as well.
I was able to import OBJ's, but I was constantly crashing when I tried to optimize the mesh. I think that I was importing meshes that were far too high poly for it, although I have yet to find a reference to what the poly limit is for polycruncher.
Try 500k for poly cruncher... preserve boundary's and batch process a folder of obj's. Ideally if you plan on using it have a script in zbrush or app of choice that will divide your mesh up and export it into the 500k chunks.
I haven't used the standalone version to know if it works with obj's, but you would assume so since they are a common format.
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Polycruncher may produce slightly better optimisations, and with more control, but that costs money, which immediately puts it out of many people's brackets.
http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/3dbrowserpro/index.asp#cruncher
I am trying to test it out on a 2million triangle mesh but when I try and reduce it down no matter what values I enter in the box it says...
applied filter Remove vertices wrt quality
Deleted 0 vertices and 0 faces
the documentation is pretty bare but I figured the 'remove verts wrt quality' is what I am after to lower the face count?
EDIT: and you could try exporting a medium res version if it gets too heavy. don't think it is necessary with an uber dense mesh really.
I've been fooling with polycruncher, but have been crashing non stop. Meshlab seems to be far easier for my purposes.
I haven't used the standalone version to know if it works with obj's, but you would assume so since they are a common format.