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.
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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
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.
@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
Hey Rick, is that plugin dead now? My googling has yielded nothing.
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.