optimizing sub-d mesh in to low poly techniques?
polycounter lvl 8
does anyone know of any scripts or tricks to make this go faster? ive been doing it by hand every time, removing all the support loops one by one, and it does really take its sweet time, not nice when working towards a deadline.
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Another thing I tried recently is saving all the edges of the blockout into a selection set (modo). Then after you're done adding loops to make your sub-d mesh, you duplicate this item and use the selection set (which is all the edges that make up the shape), inverse selection, delete. This is basically the same as the above method, but you keep your scene a tiny bit neater and IF you end up making a proportion change during the sub-d stage (you big dumb idiot), you don't have to go back and update your separate blockout mesh to match.
I use tools to select edges by angle or coplanrity then just remove them. sometimes this technique can be a bit too much destructive for support loops on low poly to prevent projection skewing (possible to circumvent it by using skewmeshes in some cases) still though most of times it does the trick and saves me from hassle of selecting a lot of edge loops by hand.
got no idea about 3dsmax, even though Any decent modeling package must have angle based edge selection options somewhere. Blender offers best built in tools for selections as far as I experienced, shift+g menu in blender has any kind of selection options imaginable. For Modo there's selection scripts by seneca for angle based edges, 'select similar' and so on. though default coplanar (de)selection and select by angle tools in modo indie would be sufficient in most of the cases.
It can help to bake a vertex curvature map, which can show you at a glance the importance of a given vertex to the overall form.
Not perfect but it can save some time. I used it when i collapsed my mesh with a turbosmooth on it accidentaly ...