polycrunch in maya?

MikeF · Jul 2008

just wondering if there is an equivalent to polycrunch for maya? (aside from reduce polygons, the results seem to unpredictable and sloppy)

MoP · Jul 2008

Nope. Your best bet is Meshlab for a free tool. And you'll need it if you're bringing stuff in from ZBrush, Maya is terrible at handling dense meshes.

IxenonI · Jul 2008

Yep. Only solution is to import in parts with i´d say max up to 2 mil. polys.

Kawe · Jul 2008

How good is Meshlab?

MoP · Jul 2008

For free? Bloody good. It's very easy to use, and produces good quality results. It would be usable for a production pipeline, which I think says it all.

Polycruncher may produce slightly better optimisations, and with more control, but that costs money, which immediately puts it out of many people's brackets.

Kawe · Jul 2008

That sounds amazing. I was following some eat3d tutorial.. up until he threw his model into polycruncher. Maybe I can continue on it now

I'll have to check that out.

robioto · Jul 2008

At www.mootools.com they have a version of their 3d Photo Browser that includes Polycruncher. You could run it standalone before you import the mesh into Maya. It's not free but it's a work around for not having a Maya native version.

http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/3dbrowserpro/index.asp#cruncher

MikeF · Jul 2008

wow, thanks mop, pretty damn good results there. quick question though, where the hell is the undo button/shortcut?

MoP · Jul 2008

There is no undo. One of the downsides of a free app. Hopefully they will put that sort of thing in with the next release (if they are still working on it).

benclark · Jul 2008

do you have any values you could share that work when reducing meshes?

I am trying to test it out on a 2million triangle mesh but when I try and reduce it down no matter what values I enter in the box it says...

applied filter Remove vertices wrt quality
Deleted 0 vertices and 0 faces

the documentation is pretty bare but I figured the 'remove verts wrt quality' is what I am after to lower the face count?

Kawe · Jul 2008

I used the Quadric Edge Decimation and it worked pretty well. It let's you choose how many faces you want left.

EDIT: and you could try exporting a medium res version if it gets too heavy. don't think it is necessary with an uber dense mesh really.

benclark · Jul 2008

ahh works nicely! thanks for the help

nazeil · Aug 2008

Nice!

I've been fooling with polycruncher, but have been crashing non stop. Meshlab seems to be far easier for my purposes.

teacup42729 · Aug 2008

What are the sort of 'safe' poly limits for polycruncher? I've gotten a few crashes with the 3d photo browser/standalone version, but I'm not sure if I'm just expecting too much from the software, or if the standalone version just can't cope as well.

CheeseOnToast · Aug 2008

Just to clarify, does the standalone version of polycruncher work on .OBJ files? Or is it just the browser that can handle that file type?

nazeil · Aug 2008

I was able to import OBJ's, but I was constantly crashing when I tried to optimize the mesh. I think that I was importing meshes that were far too high poly for it, although I have yet to find a reference to what the poly limit is for polycruncher.

spacemonkey · Aug 2008

Try 500k for poly cruncher... preserve boundary's and batch process a folder of obj's. Ideally if you plan on using it have a script in zbrush or app of choice that will divide your mesh up and export it into the 500k chunks.
I haven't used the standalone version to know if it works with obj's, but you would assume so since they are a common format.

CheeseOnToast · Aug 2008

Cheers guys. I think I'll skip it for now.

polycrunch in maya?

Replies