Da_BoS wrote:I've about 40-50 sculpted with the rock texture images I've photographed ready to be applied only take a few days maybe before Wednesday. My problem with Blender is the subdivide for the Tri-count is approx 300 and then with the next subdivide jumps to 700 tris approx and I'm not sure how to set the tris unfortunately to approx 500 so my rocks range from 300 or 700 and some of the larger boulders are 3K lol (I know to much but I was experimenting and learning Blender)
In Blender subdivide
at least doubles your tri count... or more than double, depending on the options.
Once you get the shape of the rock where you want it, and if your high poly mesh is manifold (all edges connect to exactly two polygons, and possibly some other requirements I'm not clear on) you can use "Decimate" to reduce the polycount quite quickly. Simply add the Decimate modifier and choose a ratio that is the percentage of polygons you want to keep (ie: ratio .1 is 10% of polygons kept, which is a 90% reduction from the original). This (usually) makes a very good looking mesh with most of the original shapes from the high poly mesh.
If your mesh is not manifold Decimate will say so, and will not work. You can use "Select>Non Manifold" (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M) in edit mode and Blender will show you which edges are causing the trouble, usually they are connected to 0 faces (delete them!), 1 face (connect them to something!), or 3+ faces (delete the faces you don't need... an edge with more than 2 faces is
usually an ERROR).
If you can't make the mesh manifold, you can
always use the Remesh modifier to reduce the polycount. Remesh basically tries to build a 3D shell of quads that matches the shape of your mesh, but (usually) using fewer polygons... it's not
pretty, but for organic lumpy shapes it works really well. An "octree" of 6 and a "scale" of .2 (try both 'sharp' and 'smooth' settings) is a good place to start to get a mesh with far fewer faces and a very similar shape.
Any way you reduce the polycount, you can use a copy of the original high poly mesh to bake the normal maps from, thereby preserving much of the original detail even on the lower polycount mesh.
The third way of reducing polycount in Blender is to use "Snap During Transform" and "Shrinkwrap" to
hand build a new, low-poly mesh that follows the shape of your high poly version...
do not waste your time doing this ...unless you life/job/relationship depends on it! There
are a few Addons like BSurfaces that can make retopologizing (the fancy word for "same shape different polygons) by hand a bit easier, but none of them are
fast
