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Decimation Master Problems

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi there,

Ive been using Decimation Master for a while now, on meshes that are anywhere from 1 - 6 million polies. The average time for a 4 million poly mesh has been about 5 minutes, but sometimes there is a mesh that hangs for like 2 hours before I eventually give up. Are there certain mesh features or something that just dont work properly with Decimation Master? Ive been clearing the cache before every pre-process. I also dont click outside the screen for a while, sometimes up to 2 hours, and it never finishes, any ideas?

Cheers,

#2

are you decimating an already decimated mesh? I have found that Decimation master will hang on triangulated meshes.

#3

You could try Dynameshing it. Clone it first.

#4

Hey guys,

The mesh has not been decimated before, I re-dynameshed and still have the same problem. I got the mesh down to about 900k points after dynameshing but it still hangs forever when I try to decimate. Other objects with like 8 million points dont take anywhere near as long. One of the objects I am trying to decimate is a knife blade that is quite thin, are there just some certain shapes that decimation master doesnt like?

Ive made sure I have no masks, nothing hidden, even recloned and saved as a new file, its the only subtool in the tool…

I found this program called meshlab that kind of does the same thing, however it seems to also freeze on my computer when i do the quadratic edge collapse… is there something horribly corrupted in my models/sculpts :(. I have about 15 parts, and its doing it for only 3 of them.

Oops, quick update, the re-dynameshing appears to have worked on the other two Ztools, they decimate within a minute now. The knife blade is still giving me troubles. I managed to create a solution for now by dynameshing it down to a relatively low resolution then doing some work in meshlab to get it to an acceptable tri count for baking in 3ds max. Still would be nice to figure out why this is happening, thanks for the solutions so far guys. If I ever figure it out I will let you know :slight_smile:

Cheers