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Poly Reduction tool


Monsoon
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In my opinion an direct import of reduced polygons only makes sense when the new quadrangulation function is implemented. Then you will never again use the polyreduction to tris... believe me. :)

If the pilgway team really implement this new feature, then this should "catapult" 3D Coat to one of the "pole positions" in the market.

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In my opinion an direct import of reduced polygons only makes sense when the new quadrangulation function is implemented. Then you will never again use the polyreduction to tris... believe me. :)

No, I have to disagree - it depends on the Industry you are working in.

I don't ever need animatable meshes and rarely such which allow for flexible subdivision.

So I in many cases could come along with decently reduced triangular meshes - for as long

as I don't have to fuss manually with UV's and let 3DC create an automatic set for me.

Currently many shapes with hard edges do not translate well at all to quads - for as long as this is so,

sending them as tris to direct painting would help me a lot.

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No, I have to disagree - it depends on the Industry you are working in.

I don't ever need animatable meshes and rarely such which allow for flexible subdivision.

So I in many cases could come along with decently reduced triangular meshes - for as long

as I don't have to fuss manually with UV's and let 3DC create an automatic set for me.

Currently many shapes with hard edges do not translate well at all to quads - for as long as this is so,

sending them as tris to direct painting would help me a lot.

Ok, I understand yor position. And you never need clean surfaces? I ask this, because tri-objects produces surface artefacts when they are shaded, f.e. with the gouraud method.

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And you never need clean surfaces?

Well, when the polycount can remain high enough the shading still looks very nice,

also with tris :)

If physical output is the goal or Reverse Engineering (with Nurbs tools

in 3rd party programs)one needs a mesh from the Voxel in the most accurate form.

Lowpoly quad meshes and Normal/Displacement "swindle" do not help you here.

While quad reduction is very fascinating (and I also see applications for my work)accurate

and intelligent (curvature based) mesh-reduction should always be way easier to accomplish

with tris than with quads.

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If the pilgway team really implement this new feature, then this should "catapult" 3D Coat to one of the "pole positions" in the market.

I absolutely agree with this point of the statement.

Improbable the potential in program development stands up for it. Speech about sculpting it is final.

Division of a surface from level on level, upwards and downwards. Detailed elaboration level will increase essentially, work of brushes at last becomes fast, accurate.

Very much I wait for this improvement. Also I hope that we can soon use it.

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  • 3 years later...
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Ok, I've gone and painted myself into a corner. I just started trying out 3D coat, I had done a quick sculpt of a model in C4D, and didn't want to fuss with UV's so brought it into 3DC for my first crack at ptex painting. It looks BEAUTIFUL. If I do say so myself... So, I brought out the file as an OBJ and PTEX, using the PTEX shader plugin for C4D I'm able to do some beautiful renders. My problem is, I am not an animator and would also like to animate this model. Since I didn't prepare it properly to be low poly, my plan is to use autopo in 3DC. I did a quick test run and it's working great. I need a bit of advice on my settings though. I want max detail with minimum poly count. So, issue 1: what should my settings be for retopo when it askes me upon importing for autopo?

2: and perhaps more equally if not more important... once I retopo my mesh, my PTEX will no longer work right?

What is the solution, if any, to have already sculpted and painted, and then wanting to retopo my mesh?

I think unfortunately I may have to repaint my entire model?

I'm really confused and really need a mentor to walk me through some of this.

I'm very excited about the prospects of 3DC and plan on using it in my workflow if I can get through this seemingly minor but difficult issue.

My fault due to poor planning, I realize that. post-24628-0-89100500-1359508093_thumb.j

Cheers,

J

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Ok, I've gone and painted myself into a corner. I just started trying out 3D coat, I had done a quick sculpt of a model in C4D, and didn't want to fuss with UV's so brought it into 3DC for my first crack at ptex painting. It looks BEAUTIFUL. If I do say so myself... So, I brought out the file as an OBJ and PTEX, using the PTEX shader plugin for C4D I'm able to do some beautiful renders. My problem is, I am not an animator and would also like to animate this model. Since I didn't prepare it properly to be low poly, my plan is to use autopo in 3DC. I did a quick test run and it's working great. I need a bit of advice on my settings though. I want max detail with minimum poly count. So, issue 1: what should my settings be for retopo when it askes me upon importing for autopo?

2: and perhaps more equally if not more important... once I retopo my mesh, my PTEX will no longer work right?

What is the solution, if any, to have already sculpted and painted, and then wanting to retopo my mesh?

I think unfortunately I may have to repaint my entire model?

I'm really confused and really need a mentor to walk me through some of this.

I'm very excited about the prospects of 3DC and plan on using it in my workflow if I can get through this seemingly minor but difficult issue.

My fault due to poor planning, I realize that. post-24628-0-89100500-1359508093_thumb.j

Cheers,

J

I would start with the default number (in the wizard), and see if it comes out too dense or not enough. You can always delete the Retopo mesh layer and run it again. If you created some strokes, 3D Coat will keep those intact (unless you click CLEAR with the Strokes tool active), and bring them back up, at that stage in the wizard.

Once you got a mesh you're happy with, create your UV seams (really fast and easy to do in 3D Coat) > hit UNWRAP > EXPORT Mesh. You can Merge to Ptex again (from Retopo menu), but UV's are so fast and relatively easy to do in 3DC, that would be the approach I'd recommend. The main reason to stick with UV's is so you can use the Live 2D Texture Editor...like having Photoshop open right in the viewport. Also, if you need to modify the UV's afterward, you can do so and 3D Coat will move the pixels for you....NO PENALTY!

Now you can open the file with the previous Ptex work, and use the Texture Baking Tool to bake that texture onto your new mesh.

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  • 1 year later...
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Wow, so first of all, here's something funny. I'd put this project away for a long time for business reasons as well as personal and now I have free time on my hands and am coming back to it. I googled for help again and ended up back on my own question in the thread, and the answer I didn't know you'd given! I guess I need to turn on email alerts for this forum, wow... I'm so grateful as well as apologetic for not having replied sooner. I know everyone takes time to help others and that's how we grow but it does take time and effort and I didn't mean to seem unappreciative. I'm "sort of" getting this. I sort of got it up until last night. I did the thing with retopo and I think I got a nicer and smaller (less polys) mesh, in fact I know I did, but it still seems a bit high for my needs to animate it. I'm still running into some issues though. When I changed the texture mapping using bake, from ptex back to a regular bitmap, it loads up in C4D just fine and is nearly indistinguishable from the other model in form, but somehow, to yet another blunder of my own, I didn't export the displacement and/or normals... I know there's displaced geometry from where I sculpted scratches and other marks on the body of the shark but is it possible to get those exported? Man, I really shouldn't be sharing my file but at this point I'd really love it if you could take a look. I'd even pay you for helping me fix it. It's a personal project but it's something I want to complete really badly for use in my reel etc. Right now I have a nice ptex sculpt file that I've 'baked' several times and it seems that everything but the color map comes out pure black with no actual data. Between this and me thinking my model is probably still double the poly count I want to use, I'm pretty stuck here. I haven't enough experience in the program for what I'm doing but I have successfully brought in models from another artist I worked with and added nice maps/normals/details to cloth etc. That all worked out fine just using good normal maps and the UV's he created inside maya. Wham bam... Like I said before, I painted myself into a corner but I know there's someone like you that can help dig me out. I'd be eternally grateful and much more educated as an end result. Please let me know if you can help. ... and if I can trust you'll NEVER use my model. (just joking, I know we all respect one anothers' IP)

Thanks again for your advice. I'll watch those two tuts and see where I end up. Oh, one more thing, some of the geometry must be overlapping because the rear/anterior fin before the tail has some polys that get all stretched and turned into long spikes when exported. I'm afraid if I just let it slide until I'm back in C4D and try to manually fix it with some poly surgery, I'll mess up the UVs (which btw even though I baked, are all jaggy and all over the model just like the ptex looked/I found that interesting that the unwrapped texture looked normal, but the UVs on the model looked like confetti).

Please hellllllp meeeeeeee :D

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