I was hoping that someone of you can help me out with a little problem I’m having right now concerning retopologizing complex geometry which is consisting of multiple objects.
I wanted to model a well for use in a game inside of unreal. I’ve created a mesh inside of 3ds max by using the pflow system to spawn premodelled rocks on a base object referencing the basic form of the well. this base object is not intended to be seen or used in the end, its just for the particle system to know where to spawn the rocks. I feel like the outcome of this is quite nice but, as you can imagine, probably too high poly (I believe it’s about 300k). I’ve been using a script to bake down the particle system to objects.
The problem now is that I don’t really know how to go about creating a low/mid poly version of this well to bake down a normalmap etc.
Since I’m not a pro in max or zbrush I was hoping you guys could give me some advice on how to achieve a pleasing result or at least point me the right direction
Make a proper low poly version of your well, either by making a new mesh (subdivided tube ?) and project the vertices to approach the high poly geometry (check out the conform compound), or by decimating the hiph poly, but this would need that the mesh is modeled in with one continuous surface (maybe fusioning all the particles by boolean ?) and apply a pro-optimize modifier.
Then bake your high-poly details to the low poly with the render to texture tool and the projection modifier.
You can use other tools (like zbrush) but the workflow is basically the same : you need to have a low poly that matches your high poly and bake the maps.
I would imagine that a well is a pretty simple shape, if it’s a cylinder then you’d just start with a cylinder and make it fit the general shape of the high poly stuff you created before.
By the way, if you’re using particles, you can use the Mesher object to convert the particle system to a mesh so that you can bake that detail to the low-poly mesh.
thanks for your ideas first of all. @RemyKenzan unfortunately decimating the high poly mesh doesn’t work out for the exact reason you’ve mentioned: its not a continuous surface. I tried to retopo the mesh in zbrush using dynamesh but I felt like it was smoothing out important details and also creating lots of polys where I don’t need them. Conform compound is new to me, I will have a look at it. @darthviper107 I’ve never heard of the mesher object. can you tell me more about it, like where do I find it and how to use it?
Mesher is an object under the Compound Objects category, you create the Mesher object and then set the particle system in the Mesher and it will be a mesh object of the particles, you can then convert to editable poly. I think you also have to set the position of the mesher object to be the same as the particle system so that it is in the same position.
