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Handling high poly objects in max

I have a few meshes in max 2009 imported from zbrush and the scene is knocking 8 million polys. How do you guys manage the scene with such high poly counts?

I have active degradation on but that doesn't seem to do much unless it's not working properly, is there a way to increase the framerate/make scene navigation more efficient? I only need the high detail for when I bake the normal map anyway.

Replies

  • glib
    Have you considered baking in something external like xnormal?
  • scourgewarper
    hmmm...I've read a lot about xnormal, I guess i'm open to that, i'm trying to stick to max for my workflow at the moment, I take it xnormal handles high poly models with ease compared to max then?

    Also, does max 2010 handle high poly models better, just seems this shouldn't be such a big deal i've a really good rig n graphics card and the frame rate dies even with 'moderate' 2 million poly models :(
  • Firebert
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    Firebert polycounter lvl 15
    download xnormal man... it is free and designed for a few specific tasks that focus on excellent speed with top notch results.
  • Mark Dygert
    AdaptiveDegradation.jpg
    Adaptive degradation works more with large amounts of separate objects as they move away from the camera. It's not going to do much good when all those polys are in one object.

    If you don't need to see it, turn on display as bounding box (right click, object properties) or display a lower poly proxy mesh. There are a few ways do that, the easiest is probably toss a Optimize, Pro Optimize on it and then disable it right before you bake.
    OR import it onto a hidden layer and only unhide it when you go to bake.
  • scourgewarper
    I'll fire up some of those xnormal vids then, incidentally whats the score with using such software at work in your pipeline or is it a typical 'depends where you work' thing? As it's free i'd assume there shouldn't be any issue as long as your results are good?

    @Vig - I had 3-4 meshes at 2 million polys each, I wondered why it wasn't making any difference! I like the pro-optimizer trick - never would have thought of that gonna remember that one :)
  • CodeFather
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    CodeFather polycounter lvl 15
    I use MeshLab for optimizing the different chunks from zbrush, it does great work and it is free
  • RickFX
    polyspeed is awesome to make your scene run smooth with high poly objects in it
  • scourgewarper
    Aye I used to use meshlab, pro-optimizer does the job for me these days but that was still an awesome free app.

    Hey Rick, is that plugin dead now? My googling has yielded nothing.
  • James Edwards
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    James Edwards polycounter lvl 18
    I just freeze my high poly meshes that I'm not working on. Gives a decent enough viewport speed up when tweaking projection cages.

    You should generally check with someone higher up to make sure it is ok to install software, since you don't own the machine you are working on. I would think in most cases, if the software isn't pirated, and serves some benefit to you and your productivity, nobody will mind. You never know though, so better to play it safe and go through the proper channels.
  • RickFX
    i dont really know if its dead, i am in contact to the developer, but he never told me if he killed it, i have the 0.99c version on my system thoo, and could spread it out, its free software. the cgtalk link was http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=162244 but thats looong ago.
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