Downres Meshing Techniques - Houdini to UE4

[chrisdunham95]

Hey guys, trying to figure out a good method for reducing polys in fluid mesh's / other mesh's I wish to export to unreal from Houdini. I have the pipeline via vertex textures working now trying to refine my results.

- The base sim I wish to downres I mesh at high res to begin with ; looks as usual smooth just what I want,

- Begin to downres (delete smaller pieces and bits i don't want etc or not needed) - Poly reduce and set the target poly count (1024/2048) [trying to stay as little polys as possible for use in game] - I have tweaked poly reduce settings and tried doing it manually with a remesh too and tried smoothing and averaging out point positions to give a smoother look but that also failed terribly. - I was just wondering if anyone had any techniques or ideas on how i would get not jittering low res mesh's? (if i up the poly count i can get smooth mesh's but ofcourse more polys more expensive)

(the shape is fine just the constant jitter due to the lower poly count and poly reduce sop i guess)

Thanks guys

[my guess maybe to write my own poly reduce sop/HDA or own re-mesh algorithm which doesn't cause jittering or can be smoothed out somehow - although what I'm trying to achieve may just not be possible on such a low poly count ]

Edited October 17, 2017 by chrisdunham95

[acey195]

What you can do / what your best options are depends on a couple of things, for instance, does the topology change during the sim (creating new floating parts, like splashes, or does it remain the same (set of) shape(s) that animate)

You might want to take a look at the remesh node, although it will based on the density of the mesh, not the total count of polys

Alternatively, you could build a low res mesh from the first frame (if the topology remains similar enough during the animation) and animate this low res mesh, using the high-res one.

[chrisdunham95]

1 hour ago, acey195 said:

What you can do / what your best options are depends on a couple of things, for instance, does the topology change during the sim (creating new floating parts, like splashes, or does it remain the same (set of) shape(s) that animate)

You might want to take a look at the remesh node, although it will based on the density of the mesh, not the total count of polys

Alternatively, you could build a low res mesh from the first frame (if the topology remains similar enough during the animation) and animate this low res mesh, using the high-res one.

Nice suggestions, I may give building a low res mesh deformed by a higher res mesh a go that sounds quite plausible, Thanks twan!