Smooth to Faceted Tesselation Effect

[ikatz001]

Hi all,

I am trying to create an effect where I can take any high rez model and smoothly reduce the number of polygons so that it is high rez and smooth on one side, and very low rez and faceted on the other. 

This is purely for aesthetic purposes, as I think that look would be quite cool. The area where the transition happens should be arbitrary (ie. a group of points) but to keep it simple initially let's just say the transition happens over the entire model on the Y axis, so at the top it has the highest density of triangles and at the bottom the lowest.

My initial idea for accomplishing this was simple - put down the model, create an attribute called 'weight' and assign it to points according to their position in Y, then use a Polyreduce with the Attrib Weight set to 1. Alas, this did not work. It reduces the mesh alright, but instead of a smooth transition I get a very sharp transition from smooth to completely faceted. Worse, the keep% parameter doesnt really have much effect on how faceted it is after enabling the weight attribute. 

Can anyone think of a better way to do this? im sure there is.. Ideally looking for something that could almost be a digital asset and would allow the most flexibility in defining where and how the transition occurs (ie. painting the model, groups, point attributes, etc.)

Attached is hip file and screenshot for reference. (p.s. it takes a few min to cook at the current model resolution).

Thanks!

Smooth to Facet_2.hiplc

[Yader]

The Remesh mode does a better job with this. Look into help card for which attribute name to use.

[ikatz001]

Thanks Ill take a look