hard surface modeling optimization

[cloudfx]

Hi,

 

I have question about hard-surface modeling optimization.

 

Let say I have a hard surface model of a car.

 

If the modeler was a too passionate guy who liked to model every little bolts and nuts of the car with quite amount of vertices.

 

I want to

• select every bolt & nuts ( probably select ones below 5 cm if unit is all correctly imported), and change them into right cylinder or cubes
• for the big chunks, is 'poly-reduce' node is the only choice I would have?

I hope to hear any kinds of experiences that other people approached.

 

Thanks,

J

[davpe]

hi, it depends very much on how the model was done. was it done in houdini or was it imported from any other software? are the pieces you want to replace separated objects and properly named? if the answer to both question is yes, then it should be pretty straightforward (just replace the node representing the piece you want to change).

 

if the answer is no to both (which is the most common scenario) then i think it would be easier and faster to give it back to the artist to make the changes bcs you basically have just a buch of polygons with no other data attached to it so there is no way how to tell houdini what you want to do, except manually positioning new pieces in desired positions (which you most likely dont want to do).

 

if its an imported model and you have separated and named pieces you want to replace, then you can generate point at center of each piece and copy the new geometry onto each point. the problem is that you dont have any infromation on orientation of each piece and again, i think there is no way how to recreate that acurately (depends on model of course and there might be workarounds in some cases, but generaly you cant do that). so orienting the pieces involves some manual work again.

 

poly reduce is definitely an option, but dont expect a clean mesh. it is not a retopo tool. changes like this (in any software) with no modeling history allways require lot of manual work (maybe except very easy cases) bcs you have not enough data to operate on.

 

cheers, D.