Maplet Polycount
Community Forums/Developer Stations/Maplet Polycount
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| Im really getting to grips with Maplet now and quite like its approach to level building. Mt only gripe is its very high poly count, especially if youve amended your level lots of times. I've tried using polgon reduction code (found in the archives) on it but it does'nt work as well on levels and removes essential polygons before removing non essential ones ie a totally fragmented plane was left untouched, yet it completley removed a columb. Any one got any tips or idea's to reduce the polycount? |
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| What about editing the mesh by hand in another program: Quill3D ? GLET ? I doubt you will find an automated method to do this. |
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| use an optimize modifier in some tool, like 3dsMax, if you got that, but I guess it's named the same in other apps. Optimize will optimize (wow) the polycount in a nonlossy way, while polygon reduction may simplify the mesh accepting some degree of loss of detail. The problem is, Lightmapping of the maplet mesh may be lost (depending on the App you are using). There is also an other problem with maplet: it's trying to create a closed shape at all costs, resulting in unneccessary fragmentation in some situations, like eg: you have 10 columns in a simple room. If you would use 10 cylinders wihtout caps that are intersecing with the floor and the ceil, you could use 2*2 Triangles for the floor and the ceil only. But when the columns force the fragentation of the floor and the ceil, all of a sudden you get hundreds of tris. I think the best solution is to add things like columns etc. In an additional tool, using a set of useful primitives, eg. uncapped cylinders. You could use slimshady, btw. It was written exactly for this purpose. Although I'd prevere Maplets lightmapping, it will force you to use the lightmapping of Slim Shady. I use Maplet for the rough building structure. It gives me the maplets unique creative workflow that I love. Then I add some textures in Decorator 1.8 to get a feeling for the lights and additional furniture. Then I add lights and furniture, columns, details etc in Slim Shady. Now I still may edit the components of the slim shady map since at this point all components are imported. So I can alter the textures if components and I only have to re-render the lightmap of the project file in slimshady. Unfortunately lightmapping in Slimshady isn't very fast. But once you know how to deal with the lights, it may be useful noneless. Finally I export the lightmapped level as a single mesh in Slim Shady. |
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| Thanks JFK, thats some really usefull advice. |
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