Pixologic released new plugins for Zbrush - Decimation Master, 3D Print Exporter

#7

My initial reaction to Deformation Master is “Hell Yeah! That rules!”.

I’ve tried it on a few meshes in the 4-5 million poly range and it definitely does what it adverties, which is reduce the poly count without losing the detail of the high poly mesh. Unfortunately UVs, color, and subdivisions are all destroyed and you get a very very messy triangulated model (it looks like scan data).

I was hoping to at least get something in quads with hopefully better poly spacing. Maybe even something that would help me out when I start a head model from a sphere and realize I needed more polys in the ear area.

Also, I noticed the reduced models (~450,000 polys) were a lot slower to navigate around in Zbrush than the original models. I believe this is due to Zbrush not working well with triangles, but not sure.

It’s nice to now be able to get those models into Maya to bake out AO and normal maps, but I can’t think of too many other uses for it in my workflow. I’d be interested to see any future uses someone may come up with.

As for 3D Print Exporter, I’m too comfortable using the software that my printer bureau recommends to switch now (which is already free and produces great results quickly). I’m also a little curious as to the results of people out in the wild.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade given the current positive reaction these plugins are getting.

#8

Quoted for total agreement

#9

vine: It should keeps your UVs (perhaps you didn’t check the option?) and can also do an optimization based on the polypainting (it’s in a preference).

#10

its useful for a number of things. one of which is landscape, where you dont want to use displacements.

about the polycounts. mudbox/ zbrush cheat with the navigation by lowering down to a much lower subdivision level of your model when you navigate. ( like in the 20k-200k range-ish usually ). since this plugin would display raw polygons, then if you have a 450,000 k polys it will navigate slower than usual because there are a lot more polygons to deal with. i remember loading up a 750k model into mudbox that had a few too many triangles, and a few ngons. it loaded in but it was REALLLLY slow.

im guessing that zbrush also has some huge preference for straight quad models by default.

but this plugin will be useful for people who need to export their model out to xnormal or the like and if they want to deal with an outside application to do all their baking. ( like displacements, normals, AO, etc. or even stuff like just being able to use that exact geometry for static environment objects.

#11

it will also be useful for those who wish to redo topology by snapping to the surface in other applications.

#12

After restarting Zbrush a few times and retesting, it seems like something fixed itself and it looks like the “Keep UVs” option is working after all.

#13

nice!! just seen this will have to try it out when i get a chance, not got alot of time atm :frowning: but hey ill do it lol

#14

just tried it on a current model that i am making for a job ( funny that it arrived at the PERFECT time ), and it works wonderfully. i havent tested out the masking, or poly paint, or uvs yet but as a pure poly reducer it does a wicked job.

#15

stl export, just made my life easier.

#16

just tried out the decimate plugin, it gives excelent results.
thank you pixologic!

#17

How this compares to 3dsmax prooptimizer?

#18

Yeah, Epic’s workflow has been kinda like this so far: export the zbrush model in about 500k chunks, optimize them using polycruncher, then reassemble in 3ds max to generate all the maps. Kinda tedious but efficient (reduce 20 million polys to 2 million). See the d’Artiste Charater Modeling book for details :wink:

Decimation master (ridiculous name) seems to create pretty similar results to polycruncher, but without the manual break up, export, batch optimize, rebuild part. No wonder Epic’s all over the demo images, I bet they’ve pushed for this feature for a long time now.

#19

Dunno about that, but it looks very similar to polycruncher.

#20

I’m just happy they are starting to name things without the corny Zthis, Zthat names.

#21

who the fu… cares about a plugin name…

#22

Guys who’d prefer more energy spent on fixing pretty old workflow issues instead?

#23

what if that was the first thing that came to the programmers mind :smiley: not much thinking involved. plus most their plugins have the word master following the described purpose anyway. :smiley:

would have been cooler if it was named DECIMATOR… like a terminator whos out to kill polys.

#24

well the idea is to kill a percentage of poly not ALL of them…see the history behind the name here>

deci·mation n.
Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.

at least pixologic didn’t call the plugin ‘the final soution’ or ‘the polygon problem’

#25

If memory serves there has already been another application called “decimator” which was created by Raindrop Geomagic many years ago – which did the same thing BTW.

:slight_smile:

Cheers,

J

#26

funny you should give the definition because the original script of terminator salvation was going to do just that. marcus was going to find out that the terminators calculated that humans would become extinct within an x number of years due to over population, low resources, disease, etc,etc. so the plan was to decimate the population to a manageable size. that never made it into the final story however.

eventually we will need a reason why they are terminating people though because otherwise the terminator films will just turn into something like “jason X”, where its him yet again, slashing people up. anyway. thats going offtopic :smiley: