Hello there,
I wanted some advice on generating diverse type of texture maps from very very high poly (65million or more) to low poly (65k-1M) meshes.
I already have all i need for the meshes (am about to purchase polygon cruncher as the trial gave me satisfaction), however i can’t seem to find anything that would allow me to go do (highpoly+lowpoly) => (normal + AO + displacement).
Ram usage is of no concern (256GB of ram) but i need something that will actually run not crash on large meshes, also options like maya or 3DsMax are not possible for me, commercial is ok but lower budget than that (i’m strictly a programmer, not a modeler, so maya kind of price just for normal map generation is a big no no).
Generation speed heavily multithreaded is a bonus but not a requirement (1 batch = 250GB of high poly mesh data split over 100 meshes)
Edit : Forgot to add, this is for generating normal maps for heightmap based terrain, so even though it’s already in meshes form, planar mapping is ok as all meshes are strictly planar and displaced over a single axis.
It’s on a server that i use for large world generation with world machine, it’s actually too little ram for what i do so i may upgrade soon but it gets quite pricey after that point.
xNormal! If you need something that has to handle so much polygons at all costs then your best option is xNormal since it does run on its own for all your baking purposes only.
Notably the (IMO) best baking solutions are: Topogun, xNormal, modo and in a weird last position ZBrush. If you already have all the modeling for lowPoly topology done there’s no use for topogun, though. Give xNormal a try if you haven’t done so already. The interface really looks awfully cheap but the program has a lot of depth and is able to digest millions of polygons easily.
Without having seen your actual model, though I’d still suggest at least trying to get the high model lower. 65 million polys is hell of a lot.
I gave xnormal a try it seems to be working fine, did a 1st test on 1.5M => 500K, will see how it handled 65M.
I actually don’t have much choice, world machine doesn’t optimise models (afaik it generates 1 vertex per point in the heightmap creates triangles out of that), so there are nearly flat areas that take millions of polys, of course that’s why i can go down to 1-3% of original size in polygon cruncher still have decent meshes but it seems like using the original is the best i can do (baking times aren’t a concern, however i’m not sure a 4k normal is enough to keep a lot of the detail i don’t think xnormal supports >8K).
Thanks for all the tips, seems like topogun does the trick too but i’ll go for the free ugly interface if it does the trick as it seems to generate all the outputs i need! ( i can get making a ugly ui but damn, it can’t even resize, such a pain having a program take up 1/4 of your screen only having scrollbars lol).
Don’t let the cheap interface of xNormal scare you away, though. The program is very widely used and the development is very active despite that it’s not open source. For the end of this year a new Version that also supports MacOS is supposed … well - planned to go in open Beta version together with an interface overhaul. So just ignore the looks of it. Under the hood everything’s fine.
I haven’t worked with polycruncher so far but I know that ZBrush’s poly reduction tools are very robust. Decimation master does a very good job if you want to decimate without wanting to sacrifice detail. I would asume that ZBrush will have its problems loading 65 Million polys, though. Maybe with 256GB RAM it’ll work but I can’t tell you for sure, unfortunately.
So try xNormal first. Chances are it’ll work just fine, anyways.
Nah i already droped zbrush, it’s a crashfest at this level (and lower), it’s still 32 bit, i couldn’t even get a 30M poly mesh to export to obj (just produced a 0kb obj then hard crashed) hehe. 65M poly is pretty much the lower bound of what i generate (so i’m likely going to need to do this on 200M 800M poly meshes too if i can)
Edit : speaking of which i have a zbrush license for sale! (shameless plug)
Interesting but not for my scenario (will download it for other uses however), i want to generate maps from high to low poly differences, not from a texture.
Knald is not able to bake textures from high to low poly. It’s awesome fot tweaking and generating derivate textures from existing ones. Also for extremely fast approximately AO maps for single models. Knald can be compared Crazy Bump from what it does. xNormal is different.
Thank you for the link even a year later It seems to have a limitation that’s an issue for me (8K max texture size, Wonder why because it’s using GPGPU so i could understand 16K max but 8K seems odd). Ideally looking for a non GPGPU solution for pretty big maps but it’s actually still a better deal than most others since it can bake my meshes.
Too bad that xNormal still hasn’t gone into the Beta of the new version or just a MacOX interface, though. OVer two years later and the new versions is still constantly coming soon. Luckily the existing one is still very useful and gets regular updates.
