From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essentials: VFX

Optimize with polygon reduction and LOD - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essentials: VFX

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Optimize with polygon reduction and LOD

- [Instructor] Continuing our thought about models and their level of detail, I just wanted to talk about two new objects in release 19. And the first one is the polygon reduction. So if we add that to our scene, we'll just bring it down here. We have two hi res spaceships, and you can see we're in polygon mode. The polygon count is just under 90,000 for both, and we can see if we drag the high res spaceship that we have here as a child of the polygon reduction object, it will start to preprocess the polys, and once it's done that, we can interactively play with the reduction strength. So if we commit this object, and just right click and choose Current State to Object, we'll be able to see if we just hide this that we've already reduced the number of poly to just under 25,000 which is a huge reduction. And it was very quick to do. The essence of the model, it looks pretty much the same, and we haven't actually had to do any modeling ourselves. And so if we just delete that, we can change the reduction strength. We can go a bit higher. 95, set Current State to Object, and just see what we've got here. So, yeah 17,000 and we can keep going with this, changing the level of reduction and creating different states. Now when you combine that with the level of detail object which can be found here, you can then organize your hierarchy so that you have your original model, then you have the next highest res, and you keep going down and so you've got the highest resolution at the top and the lowest resolution at the bottom. We can base how we swap these out on certain criteria. It's going to change the children based on the height of the screen size, and so if I change the screen size, you can see that we're switching levels of detail as we zoom in and out. And so we can find out a bit more about these two objects in CINEMA 4D R19 New Features, but it's just good to know that you can come in, use the polygon reduction object to reduce the number of polys on a model without actually having to do any modeling yourself, and then in conjunction with the level of detail, you can then swap those out based on certain criteria such as the height of the screen or the distance the objects are from the camera.

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