My understanding is that RC uses adaptive subsampling during Simplify, as does ZBrush with Decimation Master, as well as with ZRemesher when retopologizing to transfer detail hi to lo. My work is focused on extensive interiors in rock (caves), but I wanted to compare the results of workflow through ZBrush v. simplifying in RC, differences weren’t night and day and question whether it’s worth the trouble round tripping through ZB. I’m clear this isn’t a one size fits all, agree there’s a key difference in shooting from some distance and gleaning all the high-frequency detail out of imagery, versus working close to your subject, as I am, capturing 52 MP images from 2-6 meters.
For my comparison test I captured a chair with highly detailed wood carvings, contrasted by broad smooth sections in the upholstry, making it easy to see what adaptive subsampling was actually doing to preserve detail in the carved parts while minimizing polycount across the domed cushions. The snip of the scene in UE4 doesn’t convey what’s needed, but flying around the chair up close from one to the other, I can say it’s really hard to see much difference. Reconstruction in High produced 300 M tris, the ZB chair on the right is 700,000 tris (from 350,000 quads), the simplified (uncleaned) RC chair on the left is 500,000 tris. Still a heavy asset, but that wasn’t the point of the test.
As for how smart the adaptive subsampling worked, I’ve not tweaked ZB, but out of the gate I’d say it threw less detail into those cushions than RC. The ability to tweak would seem critical to optimizing a mesh as the world isn’t one-size-fits-all in what it dishes up in 3D capture.
Chairs_AB.JPG
Reading the above posts and weighing against my own setup, it does seem that working with high-resolution images from close range then using High quality in Reconstruction is overkill.