I’ve been noticing some errors in decimation and was curious if others have run into this as well. Currently using the latest build of 2021.6.4
A lot of my workflow revolves around utilizing polypaint for material selection later in the game pipeline, so I always have Use and Keep Polypaint turned on. All meshes are made water tight through dynamesh before ever using ZRemesher or poly painting.
I first noticed a strange behavior after running a decimation and hitting F to center the selected subtool into frame. The entire document would look as if it was empty though the tool was still active, no matter how many times I hit F, the tool would never occupy the document. I then turned off Edit mode and drew the tool back onto the document. Even after re-entering Edit mode and hitting F again, the entire tool would disappear.
Dynameshed Model:
Decimated Model: - everything looks okay, but hitting F removes the tool from the visible document and the tool itself must be redrawn onto the screen. Hitting F at anytime displays an empty document though the tool is still active.
I exported the mesh and opened in Maya. This is where I could actually see the issue. A single vertex was sent outside the mesh bounds by almost 3 Billion units. By selected the vertices of the main mesh and inverting the selection, I was able to find the vertex and move it back close to the mesh, but this does result in errors with the defined normals from decimation. and ultimately results in an error that has to be repaired after the baking process in the dev pipeline, which is less than ideal.
Imported Model: - notice the faces stretched by the exploded vertex
Component mode to find the elusive vertex: - camera clipping had to be set to 100000000.000 just to locate the vertex in the viewport
World Space Location of the exploded vertex - well outside any mesh bounds, close to 3 billion in the Y axis
Getting this error to reoccur is hit or miss. I’ve had it happen on three models that received decimation, and sometimes the vertices are closer to the model, but this has never happened to me before and I have been simply dealing with the issue as best I can to keep moving on the work at hand. The issue, however, never presented itself until these most recent updates with 2021.