How do I turn a figure low-poly?
WillowRaven
Posts: 3,787
in The Commons
I need to have an entire colony of penguins in my scene and want all the background and miground penguins low-poly so as not to cause problems. Is there a way to do that in Daz 4.11 without having to buy something? Video tutorials, if you know of any, are best for my limited skills.
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First check if the mesh is subdivided, and if so set subdivision level to 0.
If you want to reduce the number of polygons in the mesh more than that, then you would need the decimator plugin.
Since you say you need a whole colony, have you tried using instances and/or billlboards?
For that you don't nee it to be low poly, just create a ton of instances. Instancing really saves on resources and works best for plants, but penguins should work fine also.
I'm familiar with billboards, but wouldn't I need dozens of stills rendered to make them? How do I learn instances in a pseudo-fast way? I'll go try to find some videos, but if you have a line on an easy tutorial, that will help, too. If I'm understanding right, though, how will I know where everything is if I can't see it all?
Select your whatever. Create>New Node Instance, and then whatever. Usually Copy Selected Item or whatever. There's also New Node Instances, which lets you make a whole bunch at once that get scattered around nearby with the default settings. And you're done.
You can move them, rotate them and scale the instances individually, but they'll take on whatever pose and textures the original has.
I think Willow wants them all posed differently hence the different renders
if posed ones converted to props they load less heavy and can share the same textures so might still be better than figures and less resource heavy than all those rendered images as billboard textures
Right ... I know penguins don't have a wide variety of poses, but they do move. I think a bunch of identical penguins would look unnatural.
What you can do is have a few different penguins and instance them this way you get some variety.
It might not look too unnatural if you put a few penguins in the scene (maybe 4?) with different poses and then make a bunch of instances of each of them to spread around at all different angles. May be worth a try?
You could make instances from 4 or 5 originals in different poses and mix them up. With slightly different angles, the repetition will be harder to notice.
If you have either of the UltraScatter products that would help tremendously in creating your instances, distributing them around your scene, making them different sizes, and turning them in different directions. I wouldn't tackle a project like this without UltraScatter or UltraScatterPro, because moving each instance into position manually would be a time consuming task.
Does Daz have a reader utility for the .MDD export format for AniMate2?
In Lightwave for example, you can create one animated cycle, but using an .mdd reader you can offset the start time. So even with just one item instnaced your able to stagger the timing. For flocks and such just making 2-3 other cycles & also instance those, you can get a lot of variety.
I like the idea of creating a small group, putting each in a different pose, then instancing those.
I don't think I have any scatter tools ... So I did a quick search and nothing pops saying I own it. No big surprise since I've never tried using instancing before.
Since I'm new to all of this, one someone figures out a time-effective way for me to do this, I'd greatly appreciate some step-by-step instructions because I have no idea where to begin.
There's also https://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-voxelizer
Load 4 penguins pose them, parent them to a null, and then instance the null you should then have another group.
To mirrr the pose as Northof24 says select the posed figure and set its scale to -100 in the parameters tab.
Well, there was one type of occasion when yes apparently an entire flock of penguins were all doing the same thing, they had their eyes glued on an incoming plane. The men flying these planes discovered that they had an audience and had a bit of fun. They would fly this way and that, and ALL the birds would look this way and that ... then they flew straight towards them, overhead ... and ALL the birds watched the plane(s) flying over head and as they ALL put their heads back to watch the plane(s) they ALL fell down backwards. Don't recall how many planes were flying at once, but they repeated the exercise a few times thinking it was funny. There is a good reason why military folk should stay away from wildlife areas IMHO.
Here's the method I've used to make crowds of instanced people, like this one:
It's a little labour-intensive to begin with, but pays off over time. And it doesn't require the use of any paid-for scattering tools...
Thanks :) I just made a scary task look a little less daunting. Does it work the same when rendering in 3DL?
You could always just bang out a low poly penguin in Hexagon.
Don't know how to use Hex, either.
Then this would be a perfect opportunity to learn the software and the basic concepts of box modelling since a penguin is a very basic shape. When I got into Daz it was because I wanted to create references with lighting information for creating 2D illutrations so I started out just using basic Daz primitives with a grid plugged into the texture to quickly bash together a scene. I then progressed to modelling because I wanted slightly more complex props for my scenes and soon discovered I absolutely love modelling.
We can try building a low poly penguin together if you want.
Possibly not quite as refined as the plugin for DS, there is in Hexagon an option to decimate objects. Tools > Utilities > Decimate.
That is another option but it sadly decimates to tris which make it difficult to rig the model afterwards plus it destroys the UV map.
Here's a free penguin prop you can use for variety and ease. Most of these freebie props are VERY low res.
There we go. I just whipped up a quick box modelled low poly penguin. 460 quads. I'm just putting together the tutorial on how I did that and I'll post that in a bit. The entire modelling process didn't take very long.
Here you go. This is how I made the wee penguin.
Thank you so much ... do you think I could just copy/paste the texture of my emperor penguin to a figure made like that?
Cool ... thank you :)
You'd have to look at where the seams are on the penguine model you have and then create seams on your model that would let you unwrap it as close to the original as possible but you'd probably still have to edit the texture some.
Don't forget that unless the Penguin model you already have has a very large number of polys (which I doubt), then the textures are going to consume far more resources than the polygons will. As such decimating the model, or using a new low poly penguin is unlikely to make much difference unless you make the texture low resolution as well. I think you are better going the instances route (as described earlier in this thread) to achieve what you want, it is really not that hard to do. As you have already said, Penguins don't have a lot of different poses, so are ideal for instancing.