Feedback and testing:
You are very welcome to report here any issue and feature request.
Documentation is limited, but there is an handy Examples File that showcases some comparison and strengths of the tool.
Also, PLEASE somebody could test it in a real word scenario and report back (like with sculpts or 3D scans, 10+ millions polys)?
I have only tested it with "dummy" heavy geometries which could not represent real world usage.
Features List:
- Up to 22.5x faster than traditional PolyReduce SOP (tested on 24 cores machine)
- Possibly better quality topology than traditional PolyReduce SOP when source geometry is quads-based and you need to generate a low-res triangles-based mesh.
- Quads-only output with Instant Mesh wrapper
- Up to 8x speed faster than vanilla Instant Mesh
- Best speed gain with very HIGH-RES geometries and HIGH-RATIO of polycount reduction.
Some limitations
- Not as many features and controls as the traditional PolyReduce SOP
- There is an automatic cap at 50%: you can generate only an amount of polys lower than half of the input polycount. Meaning that if the input geometry has 100000 polys, the allowed output polycount is capped at 50000 polys. You can't reduce a 100k polys geo down to a 52k polys. This is generally not an issue because you normally want at least to halve the high-res input.
- When generating quads, attributes and UVs are destroyed. This is a limitation of Instant Mesh SOP.
How it works?
- At its heart there's the previously released Fast Remesh SOP [www.sidefx.com], which splits the input geometry in many clusters and remesh each one inside a compiled for-loop. Se we are talking parallel processing. This is where the enormous speed gain come from.
- At this point the geometry is so much reduced in the polycount, that the traditional PolyReduce Sop can finally take over and work on the messy topology produced by Fast Remesh to output a clean result at high speed.