What's a good triangle count for a beany hat?

[Frank Ziplon]

Actually the question may be a little elongated than the title. So I made a beany hat in marvelous designer, it had a high triangle count to begin with so I used Blender's decimate modifier to decimate as much as possible up to the point it started to break down. However it still has a hell of lot of triangles at 5k. I didn't initially make it for Second Life, I made it for an opensim grid as their market was a bit sparse, but having read through their forums they are too extreme about optimization, so I figured I may be seen as plaguing their market with poor geometry rather than contributing to giving it more content.

I've looked at a lot of my avatar's clothing and they all have pretty high triangle counts too, so I guess to a point it is unavoidable with wearables if you want them to be realistic.

My second question is regarding faces on the inside, good or bad? Some people look at things from all angles and I'm thinking that if there are no inside faces and they can see through the beany at a certain angle, there will just be complaints, but of course, having inside faces, means more triangles, they are included in the 5k count by the way.

I don't deny I am inexperienced as a modeler, I just fumble along because the information on doing better isn't out there, you often see people complaining about triangle counts, but they never offer useful links to videos demonstrating how to make low poly items that don't look like blocks just thrown together.  They just expect people to know how to do better.

Anyway, I expect a mixed response to this question, but any advise welcome.

 

Edited September 14, 2019 by Frank Ziplon
badly worded

[Tazzie Tuque]

hey there I wish I could help you with that issue, but I don't use blender or marvelous designer.. and I don't make mesh for SL.  but I do create mesh models and the reason I don't do it for SL is my program does not save in the .dae format that SL requires and taking my finished product into blender to convert it just doesn't work too well for me anyhow although I do know at least one creator that has mastered doing that..   anyhow the program I use has all sorts of tools and videos to help with reducing poly count, smoothing edges etc.. so if you think you can manage to use another modelling program and successfully convert it to .dae in blender.. you  might want to look into ZBrush.

[Chic Aeon]

9 hours ago, Frank Ziplon said:

Actually the question may be a little elongated than the title. So I made a beany hat in marvelous designer, it had a high triangle count to begin with so I used Blender's decimate modifier to decimate as much as possible up to the point it started to break down. However it still has a hell of lot of triangles at 5k.

 

 

You could try exporting from MD at a lower fabric setting (less triangles) to start with, but honestly since there are food items out on the grid with more than HALF A MILLION TRIANGLES, I wouldn't worry too much about your 5K.     Also when you use Blender's Decimate but sure and look at your finished  model for vertices that are no longer connected (and should be).  Merging those back together is a  really good thing to do === not only visually.  You may have already checked that though :D.

OH  I just had another idea. If you are using MD 8 there is a remesh ability that turns the messiness back into quads. I haven't tried it, but seems like that would be a good step before exporting out from MD.   

[Frank Ziplon]

Thanks for the replies, I will look into Zbrush, I'm not on MD 8 but it may be worth looking into another version too. It is true the market is flooded with items well over 5k, from a consumer perspective, I don't really ever look triangle counts, if I like a product and it has a lot of detail, I expect it will be quite high, but I must admit, in my own creations, I do try to be as responsible as I possibly can without destroying any nice curves an object has.

[Love Zhaoying]

Do you mean “Beanie”, or does it look like a bean (“beany”)?

[Frank Ziplon]

14 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do you mean “Beanie”, or does it look like a bean (“beany”)?

Hey, Hi sorry, you are quite right, it is a spelling mistake, yes I meant Beanie Hat, it was the early hours of the morning when I put the message up, so I guess I didn't even notice the spell checking underline  

[Kyrah Abattoir]

5K is reasonable compared to the junk you tend to see on the marketplace, but that's still quite a bit for a hat in my opinion. If it's your first project, don't sweat it too much, but keep in mind that it is perfectible.

My answer is always the same when it comes to polycount & texture usage, "as low as you can get away with". I usually don't recommend using MD if you are a beginner at 3D modeling, because MD will not teach you anything about modeling proper, it is first and foremost a physics based design and draping tool, and will not produce meshs that are clean enough to use in SL without some severe editing.

22 hours ago, Frank Ziplon said:

Thanks for the replies, I will look into Zbrush, I'm not on MD 8 but it may be worth looking into another version too. It is true the market is flooded with items well over 5k, from a consumer perspective, I don't really ever look triangle counts, if I like a product and it has a lot of detail, I expect it will be quite high, but I must admit, in my own creations, I do try to be as responsible as I possibly can without destroying any nice curves an object has.

Yeah the problem is that "they" usually don't actually use that high tri-count to add details, it's just a byproduct of their modeling workflow, without any cleanup. Before pushing it on SL you should clean out unnecessary geometry.

Here is a quick example:

This is an outfit i designed, this is what it looks like straight out of MD, even with the quad mode it's "okay", but it's still quite a mess (it's also way too dense but I wanted a good normal map source)

This is the "rebuilt & cleaned up" version. I only kept the most important geometric details and made it one single piece. (8076 triangles total)

Also important: Objects do NOT need to have an interior face, with the exception of areas where it can actually be seen. (The collar here for instance, top picture, not sure why i removed it in the bottom picture but whatever)

Once the optimized version is normal mapped, you recover most of the surface details of the original (the entire outfit fits on 1024x1024, 1diffuse, 1normal, 1specular).

Note that even if you don't use normal mapping, that's not an excuse to compensate with polygon/texture bloat. All those models don't get rendered for free.

Another thing, take a good look at your object with wireframe off, in different angles, and try to think what's the "average" point of view someone might have. then figure out if this or that edge loop is even noticeable at all. Trust what your eyes see, not what you know about the object.

Edited September 15, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Frank Ziplon]

2 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

This is the "rebuilt & cleaned up" version. I only kept the most important geometric details and made it one single piece. (8076 triangles total)

Thank you so much for giving such a detailed a response. What a great outfit you have created. I will look at my model again. Losing the inside faces I am sure will make a significant difference, but there may be other areas I can tidy it up too.

[MaxMare]

Here is a very good in depth tutorial on how to create complex mesh with clean topology whilst keeping MD UVs: Retopo

Btw the link will take you to part 2 cause that is where they showcase stuff you asked about, part 1 is more so oriented on creating base mesh in MD...

[Frank Ziplon]

2 hours ago, MaxMare said:

Here is a very good in depth tutorial on how to create complex mesh with clean topology whilst keeping MD UVs: Retopo

Btw the link will take you to part 2 cause that is where they showcase stuff you asked about, part 1 is more so oriented on creating base mesh in MD...

Thank you, I will probably view part one too as I would be interested in having a go at creating that particular mesh, just for the experience. I may never make anything other than the Beanie myself in terms of wearable clothing, but never say never. I did manage to get the Beanie's triangle count down to 2234 after losing inside faces and adjusting in other areas, but the downside was, because the Beanie sits over the ears, there was some obvious show through, in terms of selling, it's hard to know just how fussy a purchaser is going to be and because I did things in the wrong order, where I was so keen to see what the Beanie would like on my avatar, I had already baked the textures and the UV map no longer worked well with the adjusted model. I will probably do things from scratch again, as I am someone who likes to learn new things and each time you do something, there is room for improvement. Anyway as I say I consider myself inexperienced, I only stumbled into Blender because I couldn't find a certain building type on the marketplace. I am relatively sure, my buildings do well in terms of geometry, but then walls are basic structure.

It so nice that those of you, who have experience, share your experience and I couldn't be more grateful.

[Love Zhaoying]

I hope the hat comes in raspberry!

[Talligurl]

51 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I hope the hat comes in raspberry!

A beret would be better in that color

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Talligurl said:

A beret would be better in that color

 

You got it! My assumption is, beanies and berets are fairly equivalent.

[Talligurl]

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

You got it! My assumption is, beanies and berets are fairly equivalent.

People assume all sorts of crazy things

[Frank Ziplon]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I hope the hat comes in raspberry!

raspberry huh.... man that's a big ask....laughs, it does come in 10 colours, but only 2 are in the red range, this is because I'm not creative enough to create my own textures and am reliant on marketplace purchases where textures are concerned. Though to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily say that the included colours are what the texture creator described them as, but then I guess things are always open to interpretation, hence there will be a demo which allows for all colours to be tested, but they won't be named.

[Frank Ziplon]

3 hours ago, Talligurl said:

A beret would be better in that color

Hmmm, reminds me of Frank Spencer, you probably won't know who that is if you are not British, but he was a very amusing character in 70s TV I think it was, might have been 80s. Man I'm showing my age now lol

Edited September 17, 2019 by Frank Ziplon

[animats]

If you can get a rigged mesh beanie, or baseball cap, or beret down to 666 triangles, which is one LI for animesh, I would like to see it. Animesh-grade headgear is hard to find. Thanks.

Edited September 17, 2019 by animats

[Frank Ziplon]

4 hours ago, animats said:

If you can get a rigged mesh beanie, or baseball cap, or beret down to 666 triangles, which is one LI for animesh, I would like to see it. Animesh-grade headgear is hard to find. Thanks.

I'm not actually sure what the benefits of rigging any headgear would be. Hats etc attach to a static point on the avatar, so rigging seems overkill. Also there are so many avatars available these days with mesh, you would have to create rigged models for each type. Then of course with rigged items, the end user can't fine tune positioning, once it's rigged, it's going nowhere. Obviously most clothing does need rigging because it goes on parts of the avatar that move, but headgear, like I say, I don't see the point. It may be you know of some benefit I am not aware of and I would be interested in hearing about that.

Edited September 17, 2019 by Frank Ziplon

[animats]

14 hours ago, Frank Ziplon said:

I'm not actually sure what the benefits of rigging any headgear would be. Hats etc attach to a static point on the avatar, so rigging seems overkill.

For animesh, rigging is all you have. There are no attach points on animesh.

[Frank Ziplon]

2 hours ago, animats said:

There are no attach points on animesh.

Ah right, worth knowing.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 9/16/2019 at 10:12 PM, MaxMare said:

Here is a very good in depth tutorial on how to create complex mesh with clean topology whilst keeping MD UVs: Retopo

Btw the link will take you to part 2 cause that is where they showcase stuff you asked about, part 1 is more so oriented on creating base mesh in MD...

Not sure why you'd want to keep the MD uvs, they are usually closer to clothing templates than something you can pack efficiently.

EDIT: Looking at this tutorial, this is for sculpting into Zbrush, it does cleanup the model but it's still way too dense for SL.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Frank Ziplon]

On 9/25/2019 at 11:32 PM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Not sure why you'd want to keep the MD uvs

Hey, it was because I did the texturing in MD and the UV maps were perfect for baking in blender in that I wanted to add details to the texture after and the UV map wasn't stretching the texture when I did.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

On 9/16/2019 at 11:31 PM, Frank Ziplon said:

 because I did things in the wrong order, where I was so keen to see what the Beanie would like on my avatar, I had already baked the textures and the UV map no longer worked well with the adjusted model.

Do you know about the beta grid yet? Free uploads on quiet sandboxes, very useful for the constant trials and errors of making good mesh for SL.

About the ears - would a head alpha (or alpha cuts) work?