Opinions on Decimator Plugin

TomCatOliver

I'm considering getting the decimator plugin, and I've looked through as many forum threads about it as I could find, but a lot of them are pretty old, and opinions are varied. Just wondering how the plugin works in DS 4.10 or 4.11 beta? Also, considering that it's mainly the textures that eat up resources, is there really much of a gain to be had vs just brutally reducing/removing textures from background characters or vehicles etc - I'd only really be considering using it for background characters that would be out of focus in a large city street scene for example.

WendyLuvsCatz

It triangulates the mesh giving it awful topology 

I find in useful in some ways for animated stuff but for static scenes billboards work better IMO

TomCatOliver

Wendy_Carrara said:

It triangulates the mesh giving it awful topology 

I find in useful in some ways for animated stuff but for static scenes billboards work better IMO

I've been messing around this morning, removing and reducing in size as many textures as possible from figures and clothing, and I with a selection of figures with different poses and outfits, plus instances of each of them, I found I could create bigger crowds of characters than I'm every likely to want.

I was only looking at the Decimator because it's one of the 80% off items in todays sale, but there's also the cost of a new release that I don't really want (at least not at a measly 30% off) to factor in, so the Decimator isn't quite the bargain it looks at first glance.

Mattymanx

The decimator plugin was made so that meshes and textures could made game ready.  Its not needed with Genesis figures since they have sub division levels that can be changed as can a lot of clothing and hair. 

For striping a scene down, I have a product that was made just for that - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray - At the very least, read over the info in the promos for the useful info about textures and meshes.  There is also a thread about it here with additional info - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/287461/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray/p1

FYI, all the info about resourece usage in the RSSC promos was done with Daz Studio 4.10.  DS 4.11 has a never version of Iray and uses fewer resources for the same textures. 

Leonides02

I find decimator essenial for a couple of uses. For instance, if I need to reduce a crazy number of hair polys for simulation. I also use it on distant figures in crowd scenes. It's great to combine with other tools (like @Mattymax's product) to get your scenes to a reasonable level.

Ivy

Mattymanx said:

The decimator plugin was made so that meshes and textures could made game ready.  Its not needed with Genesis figures since they have sub division levels that can be changed as can a lot of clothing and hair. 

For striping a scene down, I have a product that was made just for that - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray - At the very least, read over the info in the promos for the useful info about textures and meshes.  There is also a thread about it here with additional info - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/287461/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray/p1

FYI, all the info about resourece usage in the RSSC promos was done with Daz Studio 4.10.  DS 4.11 has a never version of Iray and uses fewer resources for the same textures. 

This

 its good for reducing mesh poly of characters, and high ploy props making them ready for game and animation, its really handy for saving on 3delight renders reducing the geometry mesh.  but like Matty said its not need as much now if your using genesis  and iRAY.  i would recommend and would properly buy Matty's Shader/texture resource savers first if i did not have it already, it will save you a ton of time reducing textures and removing bump maps which are a resource killa for iray  

nicstt

You get decent topology if you stick to dividing by two, or other divisions that give nice round numbers. So divide by 2, 4, 8 etc; 8 would be crazy though.

I still use it, I have used it with Hair I then VWDed; (a alternative to dForce) and it worked well. I've not tried it with Dforce.

Leonides02

nicstt said:

I still use it, I have used it with Hair I then VWDed; (a alternative to dForce) 

Same. In fact, it's essential for a majority of new high-poly hairs.

wolf359

The Decimator is very useful for those of us exporting to other 3D programs
to render animations& physics simulations

When I need a MDD animated figure mesh  to interact with the fluid dynamics of Realflow
I use a heavily decimated version as a "stand in" before sending my scene over to Realflow
For Liquid simulations
and replace him with the full res version for the final render in C4D.

Users of "Fluidos" for DS & Carrara could likely benefit from using such
low poly proxies during simulation

I  also use it along with the C4D cloning system for crowd generation
I also use the free texture reduction script in DS for those few Daz texture that 
I actually still use that are 4K.

nonesuch00

I bought it and for some models it could decimate to as little as 5% - 10% of the original polygons and still look quite decent in Unity using Unity's built in subD. Those were vehicles though with already a lot of flat surfaces that lend themselves to decimation quite well; tires looked clunky as you'd guess. Unless you are building a game with a large number of different models in it, it's not particularly always needed to decimate at all, just export at base subdivision level.

For almost every model I tested you could decimate to 40% - 50% percent of the original polygons remaining before noticing big differences. Newer more capable HW and SW though makes  decimation less and less needed for the typical small game without a lot of assets used in it produced by hobbyists. 

As far as topology goes it's not that important if you're not going to remodel the decimated results for use in another program, and most people won't be doing so.