3DS Max - Polycounter and backface culling question
polycounter lvl 14
Hi everyone!
The polycounter in 3DS Max is a great tool, but it counts every polygon/triangle in the scene (or in your selection).
However, I would need to count only the drawn polygons and not the back-culled ones. Usually I consider them being about 2/3 of the total polycount, but it's never a precise value.
Does there exist some plugin or some option that can do this? It will be really useful for low-poly modeling.
Thanks everyone!
PS: I use 3DS Max 2008.
The polycounter in 3DS Max is a great tool, but it counts every polygon/triangle in the scene (or in your selection).
However, I would need to count only the drawn polygons and not the back-culled ones. Usually I consider them being about 2/3 of the total polycount, but it's never a precise value.
Does there exist some plugin or some option that can do this? It will be really useful for low-poly modeling.
Thanks everyone!
PS: I use 3DS Max 2008.
Replies
In the meantime, you could go into the statistics display and tell it to show total + selection. Then select all of the objects as a whole and put an edit poly modifier on it, turn on ignore backfaces and select everything on screen that you see using the rectangle selection tool. This isn't ideal but it should help you out for now.
EDIT: I haven't tried this yet but it seems similar to what you're looking for.
http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs2/cfc/
Max seems excellent, though one annoying thing is the polycount switching between quad and triangle count whether or not you're in edit mesh/edit poly etc. I'd like it if you could stick to only triangle count.
Polyboost/graphite modeling tools also has "select by perspective" which is a really easy way to count how many tris are facing the camera. It also gives you a angle option so you can dial it up and down which is a little more handy than just turning on ignore back faces.
Couple of other questions - the best way of actually working with triangles would be conversion > turn to poly, limit to 3, then right click, convert to editable poly right?
Also is there no way to save your viewport preferences? I need to keep changing the statistics and display selected with edged faces.
I've tried save UI/lockUI etc, but it reverts back to normal every time I boot Max up.
It's not a huge deal, just a minor niggle, but it would be helpful if I could save those preferences, rather than reactivating them every time.
Cheers.
ahh autodesk... /head shake
That's one way to do it. I normally work in quads and if I need to adjust hidden edges I use "Edit Tri", "Turn" or I use polyboost's Edit/Turn features.
Once you get your default scene set up the way you like it save it as "maxstart.max" to your 3dsmax scenes folder. It will load this file each time you start max. Yea it would be nice if they actually made a note of this somewhere officially... in an easy to find spot.
ahh autodesk... /head shake
It should default to this folder if you've just opened max. It can be a bit tricky to find the "scenes" folder as its location is dependent on what version of max and what version of windows you're using. Hopefully it will take you right there if you go to save.
Too lazy to check why.
Anyway, I managed to download PolyBoost, it seems a very powerful tool. Too bad it's a trial version!
Still I can't find that "Select by Perspective" button you said, where is it?
Polyboost was included in Max2010 they decided to call it Graphite modeling tools but its packed full of the same great features. The new UI takes some getting used to if you switch over from the old polyboost UI but the new version might be easier to learn since it has a lot of little pop-up help if you hover over the button. The new UI is a little laggy and could be optimized, hopefully they'll take care of that in newer releases. Same great tools though.
Another set of tools for max is Illusion Catalyst (created by our very own SyncViewS).
Also another great set of scripts comes from Neil Blevins I especially like his object and spline painter scripts.
And about Graphite, I checked out it in Max 2010, but I didn't knew it's the same as PolyBoost. Unfortunately Max 2010 is very slow (at least on my previous pc, I changed it a month ago), and I'm still using the 2008 version.
Thanks again Vig.
It is strange yep, that a program as powerful and complex as Max, some of the simplest stuff is the least obvious, or least logical