3ds Max query.

jegz · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:59

Is there any method of reducing the amount of polygons in a model short of deleting any detailed objects?

Such as making the drawing less detailed but keeping all the components of the drawing. I'm in a bit of a situation with my uni project being fine on my pc but due to the crappy pc's in uni the lecturer has put a polygon limit on the model which i neglected to notice :mad:

So i either have to start again and basically make a box with a sphere next to it (joking) or continue with my model but with less....Much less detail.

Any tips/help will be greatly appreciated and help a number of people cos we've pretty much all done it on the course

Chaos · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:18

Not sure if theres an easy way to do it, maybe someone else will know how, if you dont get any luck here you could ask on the polycount forums, a lot of those members make low poly models for a living.

http://boards.polycount.net

Messiah Khan · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:37

If your brief specifies a poly limit, then stick to that limit. In industry you will most likely have very strict poly limits, and learning that now is a good lesson. There are routines within max to reduce poly counts such as optimize, but please for the love of god do not use this as it destroys the geometry.

Optimizing is something you shoud be doing all the time anyway. In the end there should be no polygons in your model that serve no function. If this is currently the case, and you can't optimize the model without loosing detail, then have a look at learning how to use normal maps to bake the details of a high res model onto a low res model, giving you a low polygon model with the illusion of being much higher detail.

But ultimately your going to have to start reducing the polycount or start again. Sorry about that bad news. Good luck though.

jegz · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:56

Cheers.

The polygons were predominantly from the bannister spindles and the window frames I had modeled in CAD being rather detailed.

So ive deleted them lol and now im down to 9000 polygons rather than 180000 :eek:

The thing is even with the low polycount VRML is a big pile of pants and wont work properly :mad:

Messiah Khan · 6 Mar 2007 at 22:19

Eugh! VRML is awfull, lol. Not going to help your problem, but have a look at RTRE for 3D studio max. Its a real time renderin engine that allows you to walk around your model. I think you might also be able to export settings into VRML.

jegz · 7 Mar 2007 at 02:18

Sounds good. I've been looking for something as an alternative cheers.

Shall give it a look tomorrow.

Oh and yeah VRML is ******* awful :mad: