Yet another workflow question

[mindsample]

OK people... I've modelled, uv mapped, painted and now I'm in the process of rigging, adding influence objects, blendshapes and everything else in one poly mesh character. The problem is that I'm afraid of getting into trouble in the future by taking this route, and I'm quite ahead with the work, already.

The thing is, can I keep doing what I'm doing, and THEN, after everything done and animated, SMOOTH the character mesh before RENDERING?

Thanks!

Uhm, yes! In fact i would suggest you dont smooth it and instead apply a polygon approximation to it - that way the detail will be created on the fly when rendering and you dont have to deal with all the stuff in your GUI.

[Wanderer]

I'd love to know how you go about setting up render approximation on polygons because I'm not getting it. I only see it under the Mental Ray render settings and even then I haven't figured out how it works :T

[mindsample]

Well you found the window, which is a good first step and sometimes not easy considering Mayas interface :) ...
Select the object, press create (to make sure it is attached to the object select it and press assign - you should see a new approximation node in your hypergraph connected to your model), then edit it. To read about the differtent methods you should refer to the manual, but any of these will give you results. Dont set it too high - the translation and rendering will take a long time. Also consider using a displacement map as this will really bring out the full potential of approximations. Good luck!

[Xenophobe]

Hmm when I try to use approximation, I get the message "Error: (Mayatomr.Geometry) : bodyShape: polygon mesh can't be exported as a subdivision surface"

[mindsample]

in most cases this will be due to nonmanifold geometry in your polygon mesh.
use cleanup to get a better idea.

also, you might wanna use polygon approximation instead - it will probably allow your mesh to be translated and approximated - but you could end up with unexpected results due to the nonmanifold geometry - just play around with it in a simple scene it helps to understand!

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