So in doing a really complex scene it became apparent that I needed simplify certain areas in a large room at higher quality than other areas in the room. I’m developing in Destinations so my limit for the whole scene is 3 million polygons and it’s a tightrope walk in getting the whole scene to that figure (I’m doing a small exhibit in VR, but also have some inside and outside photogrammetry leading up to the exhibit room).
After doing the math and playing around in post by using other simplification tools I’ve found that RC’s simplification tool has yielded much more consistent and pleasurable results than any other tool in my workflow. I won’t go into it but decimating the whole scene or room to a certain polycount and working from that isn’t cutting it, I need exhibit item A to be 50k, item B to be 150k and so on and so forth.
Please think about regionalized simplification. I know that it will cause holes and/or seams which need to be corrected in post, but it’ll save a ton of work for really complex scenes (a common theme for VR work I think). For now I have to save a construction box for each exhibit item, mark and remove everything outside that item, simplify, export, reload, mark and remove everything but that item, simplify, export, and reload for the next item. After that I bring it all into Modo, export it and back into RC before I can do reconstruction work but it takes SOOOO long to do it this way that I keep on saying ‘man I wish the reconstruction box let me apply simplify on it rather than going through this rube goldberg machine process’.
Having just invested in a new camera and lens, I thought I’d go do an extreme test today. I found a [really quite drab looking due to the season] courtyard at the place I am contracting with, and even though it was lightly raining, I snapped about 215 pictures in about 10 minutes and threw it at RC for giggles. I didn’t expect much, given the rush and the rain.
The result was, as always, both surprising and amazing - RC picked up almost every shot (the image stabilization in the new camera helped a good deal too).
I’m yapping about it here as I think it showcases why Regionalized Simplification is so important for large scenes. The town I am in has a rough stonework to all the buildings which makes for great capture but sucks all of the reconstructed geometry into that stone work when rendering. I’m linking the test to sketchfab so you can take a look, even though it’s been decimated [from 35M on ‘normal’] to 1M polycount, the ground, shrub, tree and small statue polycount is crazy-low compared to those walls:
I love this run and gun sort of photogrammetry that RC is powerful enough to allow… but having to remove parts of that reconstruction to maintain detail in the courtyard and vise versa, recombining in a 3rd party program and putting it back into RC to texture regulates this sort of quick fun into a project. If I could regionally simplify I’d be posting direct from RC captures to sketchfab all the time for these ‘you have 15 minutes to capture this scene’ which can make for some fun and engaging art/RC showcasing.