I am using Decimation Master with ZBrush 3.2.
After the process is run, my tool disappears from the canvas and the icon of the tool in the Tools panel disappears as well. I can mouse hover over the icon in the Tool sub-palette and read its poly/points count etc., which hasn’t changed, but I can no longer paint it on the canvas.
ZBrush is still in Edit mode, but my tool is gone.
Thinking there might be something wrong with the geometry in my latest creation (a simple saddle), I tested DM on a newly created polymesh cube.
I created the cube with 2 mil polys, quickly sculpted it, assigned a Basic Material 2 and rendered it using Best.
Decimation Master took about 2-minutes-thirty to Preprocess the cube and half that time to Decimate it at 40 percent, basically cutting the poly count in half.
So I know DM works.
Where it fails with my saddle is in the Preprocess step. As far as I can tell, DM analyzes the mesh… and then Writes to Disk, in seconds. It seems to skip the Reordering step and possibly a few other steps, I don’t know.
The cube took more than two-minutes to process before Reordering and Writing the information to disk. So its obvious without the valid Write to Disk data, DM fails to process my saddle.
The saddle consists of five sub-tools and comprises 7-million polys. I used the MatCap LBrownClay and a brown Color and chose FillObject from the Color Palette. I rendered at Best quality and I can push it around the screen with ease, so computer performance is not the issue, I think.
After using the Merge Visible command from the sub-tool palette, I reloaded the merged version as a single tool and redrew it on the canvas. In Edit mode, I ran DM and the Preprocess phase took ten seconds before writing to disk. That’s my first clue, something’s wrong.
So, I tried loading one of the sub-tools (1.4 million polys) individually and running DM, but the same result occurs.
Unlike the 2-million poly cube above, Decimation Master can’t seem to process any of the saddle sub-tools, or the whole saddle for that matter, without them disappearing altogether. I know a corrupted or incomplete data file is probably the cause.
I loaded an older generation sub-tool, which was the seat of the saddle, which is covered in MatCap Red Wax and DM seemed to process it just fine.
Obviously, the saddle has problems and I can start over. I was trying to create a tool that would push the limits of my Mac and perhaps I found the sweet spot. So that’s fine.
The problem is, the saddle is but one aspect of my project.
Is there anyway to reduce the poly-count of my saddle, or its sub-tool components, using some other method besides Decimation Master?
