Can a mesh be made less dense? - SOLVED! THANK YOU KATTEY!!!!!
MJ007
Posts: 1,716
I had a custom hair made for me for a commercial project. I love the quality of the hair, but the mesh for the hair is SUPER dense and is very heavy load on my system. Whats even worse, the likelihood of this hair being used in multiple instances at the same time is VERY likely.
Is there anything that could be done to reduce the density of the mesh? To give you an idea, one hair is about 25% more dense than V4 (no hair). Or am I out of luck and have to redesign the hair fromthe ground up to be less complex in density?
-MJ
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Comments
There's something called a Decimator in DAZ Studio. I think it reduces the mesh down to the essentials. But I've never used it so I'm not positive.
Here is the link
http://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio
But it is fairly pricey and if IIRC MJ007 uses DS 2. I'm not at all sure it will work in that version
I went to the link and noticed that Decimator wasnt an official Daz3D product. So i did some searches, and it appears there are a number of resources that offer "Mesh Reduction"; so it doesnt sound like this is a new or restricted concept. So although Decimator does this, it doesnt seem like that is my only option; at least thats what Im hoping.
Meshlab: http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/polygon_reduction_with_meshlab
appear to be freeware that does the same thing... or something close to it.
-MJ
Not a new concept, but the Daz decimator works better than some other ones I have tried, I use it often as it does a great job of keeping the UVmapping intact.
Another I like is the one included in Ultimate Unwrap3D pro
But what if you're not a DS4.5+ user? What would viable options be?
* EDIT *
I would guess Ultimate Unwrap3D pro?
-MJ
Whether decimating will work well will depend on a number of factors but mainly the geometry type.
If the hair is made up of individual hairs like fiber mesh, it won't work very well from my experience.
A lot of decimation also works by first triangulating the geometry, which could be a bad idea on something like hair because of the transmaps and movement usually associated. Also you're likely to lose any morphs in the hair base.
Does the hair have subdivision applied in Daz Studio? If it is turning that off will reduce the load quite a bit to.
Decimator works in DS 4.5 - it's just that if you didn't buy DS4 Pro you have to pay for Decimator, it has never been included free.
95% certain the game dev version of Poser can do it, pretty sure Hex can too (but it would eat the UV mapping and material zones so that's not as good of an option)
Yup. I lost all morphs, and for some reason after conversion, the cr2's cant "read" the obj anymore, so the only way i can load it is to load import it.
So once the mesh has been made, is it possible for it to be cleaned up and made more efficient? Even moving this thing in the Viewport lags.
-MJ
Well if its fibermesh or similar type of geometry tubes for hair, it isn't going to be easy.
It would be almost the equivalent to a strand by strand removal process until you can lessen the density sufficiently to see an impact in the resource demand.
You would need to use a modelling app, or possibly the geometry editor within Studio is capable, to select each hair and remove it.
Making sure its done evenly other wise it could end up looking like pattern balding.
If you remove any vertices and then reimport you will lose the morphs, as they are created to modify the current geometry and will not transfer over successfully if there is a different vertex count unfortunately. Though I believe if you use the process within studio to remove excess polys it will preserve the morphs, the process is to use the geometry editor and select a poly in each hair, then Select all connected, then hide it and finally delete it. One by one its going to be a hair pulling experience in more ways than one. And not really practical I would imagine.
It would pretty much be easier to go back to where the hair was modelled and modify the generation process for follicles to be less demanding if that is possible. But again the morphs would need to be recreated from the new base.
Geometry based hair can be quite demanding, especially on an older system, which is why its only recently started becoming popular, as the average system can handle it better.
Crap!
-MJ
Depends on how they created it. If it's a particle system in their source tool, then they can usually specify a density when exporting. E.g., the Look at my Hair plugin for Studio does this. And I'm pretty sure particle systems in Blender let you set this on export as well.
This is how i was told how the hair was created:
The hair was constructed using PaintFX hair strands inside Maya, so the geometry is admittedly very dense, but the quality of it is just crazy, plus I was able to do the morphs for it using the hair simulation and real physics out of Maya so the look of the morphs is really high quality.
-MJ
Some Maya hair types can be converted into OctaneRender hair curves that use considerably less VRAM / System resources.
As far as I gathered from Otoy forum threads PaintFX is supported by the OctaneRender Maya plugin:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=41044&p=194132
- - -
But I guess that does not help you much now unless you are using OctaneRender yourself.
But if you do - maybe the hair could be provided as .ORBX or .OCS file format and then you could use it in OR standalone or OR plugins.
But with those file formats you may loose the morph information as well.
To make full use of the hair with all the morphs you may need to work with maya on that project.
- - -
If you use 3D coat you can delete edge loops from a geometry to decrease the number of polygons.
You can do that in Hex too, but either way will kill the morphs.
So it looks like the only way to really tackle this is to basically have the hair recreated.
-MJ
Depending on how many morph targets there are, you can always export the original model and the model with one morph at 100% and the rest at 0%, then decimate all the exported models and re-morph the figure. This could probably be done with scripts in Blender (free, and it decimate. I believe it will do the right thing, re the UV maps, too).
Modo and Lightwave should allow you to preserve morphs while editing, as long as you load them as morph vertex maps before beginning, then export them and reload them into DS/Poser when done.
I ran the Scene Info for my custom hair and got the following numbers:
Nodes: 116
Tot Verticies: 84513
Tot Triangles: 0
Tot Quads: 74379
Tot Faces: 74379
I did the same for V4 (no clothes/no hair) just to compare:
Nodes: 204
Tot Verticies: 70638
Tot Triangles: 0
Tot Quads: 66830
Tot Faces: 66830
Does anything stand out as odd or "intensive"? I also included a render of the hair just so you guys can see it.
What confuses me about this situation, is moving the cameras, rotating the scene, etc. doesnt lag at all, nor does rendering. The hair renders in about 4-5 secs. But any activity with the hair model itself has a good 2-3 sec lag. Moving the hair on any of axis, applying any morphs, etc. all lags.
A single V4 doesnt lag on my system at all, this hair does. Is it possible something else might be going on? Because, I would think density of the model would slow down rendering as well and it doesnt appear to effect the rendering at all.
-MJ
Its one thing that is awesome about the Daz3D that I love more than anything, is the people you meet.
Quite a few years ago, I had to pleasure of meeting an AWESOME individual that goes by the forum name "Kattey". I dont know much about her personally, but over the years, she helped a number of vendors attain higher product value by the supplying freebie add-ons she often gave away. From added morphs, fixes, DS Mats, you name it , over and over again, her generous nature helped many users like myself out a number of jams... by getting tremendous value and bang for the buck for the content we invest in.
And as great fortunate would have it, she helped me with this one. With a single switch from turning something "On" to "Off' located in an area (again thanks to her), I was completely unaware of, and even if it was aware, we have no idea to turn off this certain switch, my issue has been addressed and this hair performs beautifully now. The mesh was fine, the .cr2 was a lil tricky, but she got to the bottom of it almost instantly and I couldnt be happier.
"Kattey", as Ive said to you personally, I will say here.... YOU ROCK!!!! And many, many thanks!
-MJ