Pile of skulls

[rexnoctu]

Hello,
I am hoping for some suggestions or tips. I am building a reliquary that will have several panels full of skulls. The trouble is that by the time I finish filling the space the poly count is so high the model becomes unworkable. So what is the best way to handle this situation? Place the skulls in a separate model that gets loaded and parented to the main model or is there a better way? I haven't decided how close the camera is going to get to this when it is done so going with low resolution skulls isn't an option quite yet.
Thanks

[BeeVee]

Use subpatches to create the skulls. That way you can reduce the resolution of them quite significantly and yet have good quality for close-ups using APS.

B

[GregMalick]

Hello,
I am hoping for some suggestions or tips. I am building a reliquary that will have several panels full of skulls. The trouble is that by the time I finish filling the space the poly count is so high the model becomes unworkable. So what is the best way to handle this situation? Place the skulls in a separate model that gets loaded and parented to the main model or is there a better way? I haven't decided how close the camera is going to get to this when it is done so going with low resolution skulls isn't an option quite yet.
Thanks

As BeeVee suggested, the low-poly/APS solution is best. But you don't need to have everything in one model (as you've realized). If your issue is that Modeler is slowing down (see highlited quote above for emphasis) because of all the polys, either do separate skulls (some can be reused and simply positioned differently in layout) - or if you feel you must, at most do a shelf of skulls as an LWO.

[tomclancy_jack]

It looks like you could use a very useful plug-in made just for this sort of thing.

http://www.happy-digital.com/hdinstance_docs/hd_instance.html

Keeps memory usage to a minimum using its black arts.

[kopperdrake]

You beat me to it :) It would save the hassle of building lower rez versions of skulls you may already have, but then it does mean spending money.

Without spending money I'd do as BeeVee says, or you could always use the Reduce Polys tools to create lower rez versions of your skull that will never get near the camera. Personally I'd create 3 versions of the skull (skull_low, skull_mid and skull_hi for example), whether with sub patches or pure polygons, and place them individually in Layout. That way Layout will only have 3 different models that you will clone there to distribute them as you want. If you ever get too close to skull_low, for example, you can then just 'replace' it with a skull_mid or skull_hi, whichever is more appropriate.

If you go the sub-D route from the start with a single skull then in Layout, in the skull's object properties panel there's a tab called Geometry. In there you can add a custom object called "Level-of-Detail Mesh Refinement". That looks like it will set the sub-D level of detail on the fly, depending on how close the camera is to it. Having never used it though I can't be sure - I guess Monsignor Vost or someone else can clarify.

[Surrealist.]

Hello,
I am hoping for some suggestions or tips. I am building a reliquary that will have several panels full of skulls. The trouble is that by the time I finish filling the space the poly count is so high the model becomes unworkable. So what is the best way to handle this situation? Place the skulls in a separate model that gets loaded and parented to the main model or is there a better way? I haven't decided how close the camera is going to get to this when it is done so going with low resolution skulls isn't an option quite yet.
Thanks


I am with Ben and others on this one too. The nice thing about SDS is you can set it to 0 in layout resolution and APS for rendering. The key thing is how dense have you made that skull? With subpatches you should be able to create a good low poly object that will subdivide nicely at render time.

[THREEL]

This is more of a question, than a comment. Could FX Linker be used to place a nicely modeled SDS version of one skull in all of the locations that he needs? Just a thought.

[THREEL]

Here's a test render of what I'm talking about. I placed a head object of a character I'm working on in my scene. Then, I placed a 7' x 7' x 7' Partigon emitter in the scene. I gave the emitter a birthrate and limit of 100 particles. Also, I matched the Lifetime of the particles to the amount of frames in the scene, so none of the particles die-off.

From there, I went to FX Linker and linked the head object to the particles. I set the rotation to random and told it to create 99 copies. One for each particle. It took a little while for Layout to generate all the copies, but it wasn't that long before I had a pile of heads. Yes there is some overlapping, but each one of the heads is a separate copy that can be moved and/or rotated individually to fix that.

[THREEL]

Oops!!! Forgot to add the test render.

Here it is.

[BeeVee]

By the way, if you don't want particles to die off no matter how long you set your scene to, you can just set their lifetime to 0, then they never die.

B