Polygon reduction

[paulison]

Hi Guys,

Im trying to find ways of reducing my crappy ArchiCAD model mesh's as they are always HUMUNGOUS. rather than take 5x as long to model in viz, im going to stick to ArchiCAD and just reduce then meshsmooth whatever I can. Here is something im trying out now, does anyone else use something to reduce polygons?

http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/p...cher/index.htm

[jujubee]

I've tried polygon cruncher before and it works great.

[RErender]

You can go a long way to optimizing an archicad mesh by doing two things:

1. Apply a material called "delete" or something like that to all the sides of parts that you don't need in Max. Like the bottom of slabs or parts of wall that can go. Then import them into Max by material, then it is simple to select them by name and delete them.

2. Weld the vertices! There are 6 or more vertices at some mesh corners, you will be amazed at how much faster you can work after welding all the vertices.

That being said, we used to model in Archicad, always thinking it was faster than in Max but with some attention to method we are able to model in Max at the same speed if not faster.

[paulison]

hmm cool thanks

yeah ive tried modelling basic walls etc in viz and that side of it seems very fast. Our archicad library is pretty good though for doors and windows so for now im sticking to ArchiCAD

welding verticies....is this something that is done as an option when imported?

[paulison]

holy crap I just select everything and convert to poly mesh and the number of faces in my scene goes from 187000 to 68000 without doing anything else.

thanks for the tip man, this will speed things up heaps

[Trapezium]

Faces are counted as quads in a Poly Object and triangles in standard Editable Mesh. (The names may be slightly different in Viz)

--Jon