High poly count in Maya?

#1

Dear All,
I sculpted a dragon and after texturing I wish to render it in Maya 2015.
The unfortunate fact is that it is very detailed, about 4 million polygons altogether. Since it has many spikes, using a normal map with a lower-poly base mesh is a no-go and since Maya cannot bear high polygon counts I will be forced to use displacement maps.
I would like to ask you how to achieve this without displacement maps? If I can’t do that, I plan to texture the high-poly model with all the spikes and stuff then use the displacement map - but I have the textures created for the high-poly model. How to pull that off?
Thanks in advance

#2

what’s wrong with just rendering the high-res model?

Does it need to be low-res because you going to be animating/rigging it?

I don’t think maya really has good tools for doing what you’re wanting to do. I’m not even sure if zbrush can create a normal or displacement map based on two versions of models that weren’t built as a single subdivided model workflow.

#3

if its not animated you could use the .vrmesh exporter…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPAlC5nr2H4&feature=youtu.be

and baking between two different meshes is no problem and if you like to transfer the textures just use mudbox…

#4

4 million polygons isn’t a Maya limitation at all. It might be a Viewport limitation because your graphics card sucks, but that’s not Maya’s fault. And rendering billions, even trillions of polygons is also not a limitation of any of the modern rendering engines.

Can you show us your model? It might help to diagnose the issue. And also, we’d love to see your dragon sculpt!

#5

Thanks for the posts, lads/lasses.
To InfernalDarkness: The graphics card is strong enough to run Witcher 3 on high giving me 24 FPS and applications like ZBrush can manage 30 million polygons visible so it must be fine. The problem with Maya is that it crashes during the import. When importing lower poly meshes, it does fine(using obj import). I’m using a student version, maybe that is the issue but I’m not sure. All I know is that it can’t even import or when I’m subdividing it crashes :confused:
The sculpt is my 4th model in Zbrush, I’m far from being a pro. What is more, I’m using only a mouse to get it done, so no Wacom or smth like that.
To sentry66: Yes I with to render the high-res model, no animations/rigs this time.
To oglu: Maybe I give it a shot, but I do not know anything about MudBox :confused:
dragon.jpg

#6

mudbox is really easy to learn…
if you are familiar with zbrush you learn mudbox in 5minutes…

#7

To oglu:
I understand, but I no not wish to :smiley: Zbrush must be able to export geometry of this polygon count or no one would use it. I tried obj export, but as I said, Maya cannot read it when it is this large. As you advise in favour of MudBox, I assume you are a MudBox user? But if you are familiar with Zbrush, can you offer me another method to export my meshes into Maya? A former commenter said Maya does tolerate higher poly counts so there must be a way to get this done.
Thank you for your reply one again.

#8

the way its done is with displacement…
and for testrendering you could use the polyreduce in zbrush…

#9

Maybe ZBs obj export is weird.
Can you import the obj into another software, for example blender, which is free?
Then you should be able to reexport and import into Maya.

#10

You could try reconstruct subdiv to see if it’ll create a lower-res subdiv for you. You could also try ZRemesher set to half and then reprojecting the model onto it, though I don’t know how well that would work.

If you’re only having viewport problems, maybe export a low-res mesh without subdivisions, and using render-time proxies so the high res mesh is used during rendering but not in the viewport. This should be pretty easy to do since it sounds like you’re not trying to animate it.

Are you able to load the model if you turn off all viewports (switch the main window to something like an outliner), so it doesn’t try to display it? That would help determine if it’s a viewport problem, and give you a chance to adjust the scene to figure out what’s wrong before it tries to display it.

FYI, ZBrush can export directly into .MA, which is what GoZBrush uses.

#11

I did my zremesher round and it worked. The issue is that when I remesh to around 60k polys the export to Maya and apply smooth view, it’s awful even with normal maps.
As for the displacement, I understand Zbrush can create those as I wrote in my very first comment that started this thread. The fact is that I do not know if I can apply my textures - that will be made on the high-res model with all the spikes - to the displacement version in Maya.
Also, what about other primary 3d applications? How do they tolerate high polygon counts?

#12

It’s not expected to look good in the viewport after reducing the polycount by 1:100, it’s just expected to be lightweight until you get to rendering, where you pull in the full mesh or displacement.

There shouldn’t be any trouble applying textures. Just make sure that you don’t lose UVs when creating the low-res mesh. ZBrush is very hit or miss with that.

FWIW, I just created a bunch of high-poly spheres and Maya was fine at around 6mil vertices. Not textured or anything, but the framerate was around 24 FPS. Make sure it’s not importing with smoothing turned on, since that’ll probably fail badly with a high-density mesh like that.

#13

You subdivide in Maya by mesh->subdivide?
I have just tried to export as a .ma file from zbrush then import to maya. It imported, but nothing happened after that, it crashed. :confused:

#14

You were right, I have 12 million tris by smoothing a sphere, everything is fine, I bet it is around 30 fps.
The million dollar(or polygon?) question is that why does Maya boycott zbrush sculpts??

#15

In-viewport smoothing is separate from the smooth mesh deformer. You want it disabled if you’re importing a high-poly mesh. It’s disabled by default, and should be disabled if you’re importing OBJ, but it may be enabled by ZBrush with some export formats.

Also, you said it crashed. Did it hard crash, or did it just freeze?

Did you try loading the mesh with the viewport disabled? Click the viewport box on the left toolbar and select something like Outliner to change the viewport to something else. That’ll usually keep it from doing processing only needed for the viewport (like smoothing, texture loads, etc.) and would help tell whether the problem is viewport-related.

#16

I did mess around with some smooth settings and it finally accepted my obj :smiley: nice fps in viewport and so on. I do not know what the problem was but it is solved.
Thank you all once again.

#17

zbrush doesn’t use the video card, only CPU and your main system memory. This is actually why zbrush is so fast - it’s not actually manipulating polygons. It’s manipulating point cloud data made to look like polygons.

Witcher 3 isn’t a good measuring stick at all in regards to CG viewport performance. Witcher 3 probably has no more than around 1 million polygons visible at any given time where each object is likely anywhere from 1000-60000 polys. Dealing with a single high res object is a totally differenct thing.

#18

GoZ outputs the mesh with displacement values, and connects it to a mentalRay aprox node. Why are you having problems?

#19

(“Why are you having problems”? He said it’s crashing, which seems pretty like a pretty clear problem.)

Unless you’re willing to share your data, I don’t think we can help you much more. If you have access to Autodesk support, that’s where you might want to look next.

#20

Two replies up and I told the problem was solved, no further assistance needed. I appreciate all the help, however.
GoZ did not work and I understand it works for you, for example, but it does not mean it works fine for everyone else. I asked ZBrush forums but nothing came out of it and I did not care that much for my way is the obj way :smiley:
As for Autodesk forums/helpdesk, usually a week later they reply they cannot help or no reply whatsoever, that is why I came here and eventually found the answer: auto smooth when importing messes up with high-res meshes.
As always, thanks for the answers.