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Auto-Retopology - furniture question


huckleberry
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Hello,

I've quite a few meshes that I need to reduce polygons to. Most of them are furniture. I couldn't really manage to get any good results from Auto-Retopology and I was wondering if you folks have any tips? My guess is that Auto-Retopology is more useful for organic stuff than hard surface.

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Try increasing the auto retopo settings a bit. Try setting the intermediate resolution to 400 (but don't go any higher then 500 or it starts get unstable and can easily crash). Same with the approx poly count, try not to go higher then 50,000 polys. This should get you some better results for hard surface stuff. But I personally don't find it that great for hard surfaces.

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Yes, organic models are much better with Auto-Retopo.

Hexagon seems to have good hard surface decimation routine as part of it's modeling program.

Picture is of two chairs

One at 60,000 appox polygons (Left side of picture)

After decimation:

3400 polygons with hard edges intact.

Daz3D is still giving away hexagon for free. I think you will have to create an account to get the serial number.

http://www.daz3d.com...what-is-hexagon

I have not used the decimation routine alot in hexagon but it's free for now, so it's worth a shot,

Hexagon is my favorite modeler for a number of years now as it is setup more how my mind thinks... :)

post-518-0-97828800-1337543914_thumb.png

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Opps, I did not notice huckleberry was a new member... Yes tried the decimation in 3DCoat. Depending upon how many polygons you have in your model and how low in polygon count you want go will effect the results. Once you hit a certain reduction number in 3DCoat it has a harder time with hard edges.

The smarter decimate under the voxel menu, I think has got a bug as it does not keep your detail as well a few versions ago or it seems that way...

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Yes autopo is better for organic stuff... However, there are two things you can do. One of them is increase intermediate resultion quite a bit and then try to mark all the hard edges with the stroke tool in the part of the routine that you can do so, this will force the autoporoutine to put edges in those hard angles and get closer to your hardsurface object, that plus some manual tweaking and a normal map you will get good result.

another thing is make a manual topology, which I think is the best way to go. 3d-coat retopology tools are fast and with autopo you will never get as good results as manually...

I once asked andrew about this, hardsurface retopology, and he told me he had permission to implement some beautiful technique (He sent the papers) that made awesome hard surface topology, but I guess he hasn't found the time to implement it.

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Yes autopo is better for organic stuff... However, there are two things you can do. One of them is increase intermediate resultion quite a bit and then try to mark all the hard edges with the stroke tool in the part of the routine that you can do so, this will force the autoporoutine to put edges in those hard angles and get closer to your hardsurface object, that plus some manual tweaking and a normal map you will get good result.

another thing is make a manual topology, which I think is the best way to go. 3d-coat retopology tools are fast and with autopo you will never get as good results as manually...

I once asked andrew about this, hardsurface retopology, and he told me he had permission to implement some beautiful technique (He sent the papers) that made awesome hard surface topology, but I guess he hasn't found the time to implement it.

Yes totally, I forgot to mention that putting strokes on the edges would help. Thanks!

I recall Andrew mentioning this (the new algorithm) as well. I hope it's something he can do for the release of v4, or maybe at least early in the v4 cycle.

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