Reducing and working with high poly models

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys, 
I'm working with a model with a poly count of 3.6 million, it was given to me by the client but I am unable to work with it. 
I want to export it as an OBJ to be used in Element 3D. Managed to reduce it in Meshlab but lost all textures. 
I am a student and am more of a compositor than a modeler/animator. 
Any help reducing the model and maintaining its quality would be brilliant. I have hada look and tried everythink I could find but most things crash 3Ds MAX. 
Thanks, 
Ben.

[kalexr]

Have you tried the ProOptimizer or MultiRes modifiers? I'm not sure how well they'll perform with 3.6 million polygons, though. You may want to try combining all the elements into one mesh if selecting all objects and applying the modifier crashes 3ds Max. 

[aon.914858227]

ProOptimizer is the way to go. Lot of options to preserve normals and maps and it can be instanced across multiple objects.

However, i am surprised by the bad performance shown in your screenshot.

3.5 million poly shouldn`t bring 3dsmax that down to 1fps. I worked with much higher poly scenes (up to ~14 millions) without crashing and at much higher frame rates(~20fps].

So i wonder what system you are using?

[Anonymous]

Hey, thanks for your reply. 
I have been using ProOptimiser but it wont touch the whole thing so I've been doing bits at a time. Also it seems to reduce everything evenly so I have to select similar objects so that I dont reduce some objects too far and break the boarders. The model feels buggy to be honest but i'm not sure why. 
I'm working off a pretty powerful machine:
2 x 3.0Ghz 10 core Xeon
64GB DDR3
2 x Titan Black 6GB

I've not had problems with the machine before so I'm thinking its the model just not sure what to do. 

Thanks, 
Ben. 

[aon.914858227]

Your setup should handle this scene without any problem. It`s far more powerful than mine.

You can check your model (or those parts that seems buggy to you) with X-view:

Viewport [+] -> xview.

Or you can use the stl-check modifier.

[Anonymous]

Hmm, its a little mad but stl Checker is crashing max on any object over
16k polys and under that I can see most objects have about 50 errors.
Having Identified the errors, is there a method of cleaning it up a bit.
Xview crashes Max if the entire model is selected.

[aon.914858227]

3dsmax2014 and up use Meshinspector->Mesh Auto repair which should be on by default.

Overlapping vertices and open edges can be welded.

Just refer to 3dsmax help on mesh errors:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2015/ENU/?guid=GUID-26CAF521-851A-4F91-8937-C44B40BB20F2

[PROH]

Hi. Follows this thread, and just want to throw in some small informations, that might be useful:

1) Poly count doesn't always tell the whole story, since polys can contain any number of tris (depending on the modeler). If you really want to know/compare the model size, you should count tris.
2) Max can handle a huge amount of tris/polys, but is far less happy with a huge amount of objects. So if Max is having problems handling a file, it could be caused by to many objects.
3) So far I haven't found any automatic way that won't turn your model into crap. So a lot of hard work seems to be the only way 😞

Good luck. Hope it helps.

[Anonymous]

Hi guys, thanks for your input, I have tried all of the suggested ideas.
I think PROH's right about the large amount of objects.
Unfortunately when I convert to editable poly everything deforms loads and
it looks awful.
I wouldn't mind changing it into about 20 groups with a few objects in each
one but every little rail and cap is a separate object.
Is there a method of selecting multiple objects via their materials and
combining them without tuning them into editable polys?
This really is becoming a nightmare.
I think its been converted from a CAD program or something but I can get my
hands on the original.

Thanks again guys.

[Steve_Curley]

Any chance you could post a (very) cut-down copy of the scene - choose some objects which (a) screw up when converting to Poly, (b) you would like to combine and (c) are mundane enough not to be copyright/proprietory. Select them, Save Selection (to a new filename) and then zip that scene file.

Everyone's guessing in the dark here - the devil is in the details, though PROH is right about the number of objects as Max is far happier with a small number of complex objects than many less complex ones.

Which verion of Max are you working with?