decimating crashing - zbrush

bugo

Howdy, I have a 14 million terrain to decimate, but it seems decimation in zb3.5 r3 is crashing on me.

I have only 1 polygroup
Uvs are fine, just not inside 0-1
I do have some triangles in my basemesh

Could any of these reasons be the one why is crashing?
I am using freeze borders and keep uvs.

thx in advance

divi

tried splitting it up? 14 mil seems a bit much.

bugo

problem of splitting it up is that if I leave the seams it will show later on ingame.

BeatKitano

You can protect the seams (option in the pref menu or decimation master palette) to avoid just that

bugo

I know, but for the lowpoly as I will be decimating I would have to manually fix it by hand.

bugo

Yeah, whenever I go to 6million it decimates, pretty sad...

MoP

You could try Meshlab I guess... as a last resort?

bugo

could be, I can try, I remember using Meshlab months ago before in ZB and I couldn't decimate a mesh that was 5 million. But thanks for the try MOP

bugo

ok, after being able to handle the decimation... I got into another issue...
THe SCALEING issue that everybody goes, but on top of that whenever importing the mesh into zbrush after fixing the scale, I lose all detail and the mesh gets smoothed instead of having the detail I had before... Anybody here got this issue?

divi

import into any other tool than the quadsphere basemesh for the scaling issues.
import it with the zsphere selected. maybe the smoothing comes from importing into a tool that has several subdivisions. not sure on that one though.

Neox

also (using sphere3d instead of the polysphere is CRUCIAL) open up your first iteration when you imported you basemesh, i hope you have iteration, go into the export tab under tool and write down the values you have there, there have to be cryptic values, if 1,0,0,0 is written there, something is off and it will come back to your 3dapp beeing scaled. so if you've written down, copy these values into your decimated version

scaling the base will always end up crappy when subdividing, instead you could export the highres, scale that and rexonstruct in in zbrush, but it should not need to be done when you remember your exportvalues from your first load into zbrush