Low poly cage for a high poly mesh - performance issues

Khalo

This is a Maya related question, but if there's any major advantages/differences when performing this task on 3DS Max, I would love to hear about it. I apologize for not stating this in the topic.

Well, I've been spending my hours at work reading up on the creation of normal maps and all things related to it, and I finally decided to ask the question that has been bothering me for over a year.

Lets say I've sculpted a high poly mesh (100,000-200,000 faces) in zBrush and have imported it over to Maya. I want to produce a low poly version of this, so that I can bake my high-poly onto it and get rid of the blasted resource hog of a mesh.

Unfortunately, the mesh will obviously make my life very difficult, as it would slow Maya to a crawl, making it rather difficult to model around it. Making it invisible would make my life somewhat more difficult, since I am trying to capture its silhouette.

Note: I have a pretty solid machine - 2.67ghz i7 920, 12GB of RAM, etc.

I've seen people working with very high-poly meshes, and it boggles my mind. Am I missing something?

butt_sahib

http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/features/decimation/

Also, freezing your dense meshes in Max makes working around it as easy as....well...anything

cryrid

You wont always have to import the highest level of the sculpt for retopology. You don't need all that surface detail after all as you just want to build something that matches the silhouette. One of the lower-to-medium levels should have all the form you need for this.

Khalo

Aha! Perfect - thank you, butt_sahib and cryid. Both of your answers will come in very handy.

SpeCter

I don´t quite get it, with this machine Maya should have no problems wirh 200k faces, that´s nothing at all!
I don´t have a machine which is nearly as good and can work with 1 million polygons if i have to.
I work with 3dsmax, but maya should perform at least as good as 3dsmax.

And one advice for 3dsmax would be to use just one View(like Perspective) to work with if you are using high poly meshes.

bloodmoon

Khalo wrote: »

Note: I have a pretty solid machine - 2.67ghz i7 920, 12GB of RAM, etc.

You should not get any problems working with an mesh of 100-200k at all on that computer.

I myself have a laptop with a dual 1.66 ghz, 2 gb ram and a 512 mb dedicated graphic card. And I can with no problems work with a 100-200 k mesh and even larger numbers than that. (All in Maya of course)
So something is wrong, I don't know what, but something is.

Khalo

Hm, I wonder what could be causing the slow down - the 200,000 was a bit of a guess, I don't remember how high-res the model I was working with was the last time I had Maya slow down. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that it wasn't too far off.

Are there any settings tweaks that any of you have done in order to get Maya to run more efficiently? I'm running off of the default settings.

Unfortunately, the night I started this thread, the SSD I was using for my OS and applications decided to flatline - I probably won't be back up and running before tomorrow, since a couple of issues are popping up involving increased low-load temperature, etc. Still, I'll try out any advice you guys may have as soon as I can.

SpeCter

Working in Wireframe Mode can cause some slowdowns, so if possible only use wireframe for the low resolution mesh.I don´t know if it really helps, but i think it helps to freeze the high resolution mesh(i do it all the time, because otherwise i tend to select it while retopologising).

If the mesh consist of many parts hide parts which you don´t need.
And as i said work on one window, not four.Otherwise your computer has to render it 4 times.

Khalo

Is it possible to freeze a mesh in Maya? I know butt_sahib mentioned it for 3DS Max, but I haven't heard of a similar function for Maya.

SpeCter

You can put it on a different layer and freeze the layer or use "Freeze Transform"(I´m not 100% sure, since i´m no maya user, but it should work)

CheeseOnToast

Make sure you don't have high quality viewport rendering switched on. It can bring Maya to a crawl when dealing with dense meshes.

SpeCter

I think he said, that he has standart settings in maya and if i´m not mistaken for default settings the high qualitiy viewport rendering is disabled

Khalo

Ah, freeze transform doesn't actually freeze the mesh - it zeroes the scale/transpose/rotation attributes of an object.

I'll keep all of this in mind, though, when working in Maya. I think for now I'm going to try my hand at max, though, and see where that takes me.

SpeCter

As i said before i´m by no means a maya user so i wasn´t sure about freeze transform, but maya should perform as good as max though :-/

Bender bending

I have the same situation. My config AMD PhenomII X4 955 3,2Ghz 8Gb RAM and Maya lagged on 200-500k polygons. And selecting different object very slow. But on Softimage I work with 15 000 000 polygons and softimage not lags. I think this problem in Radeon's videocard.
Sorry for my english.

SpeCter

Can´t say i have no problems with my ati card but i don´t have slowdown´s because of it.Most problems are shader related.