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Stop Disabling Clothing and Parts Before Uploading and Just Decimate or Un-Subdivide Instead
I keep seeing a lot of people uploading characters with clothing and parts disabled in order to stay below the triangles limit, so even though it was covered in Blacky's clothing tutorial, I feel it deserves repeating:
If you're exceeding the triangle limit when trying to upload a character, you're probably forgetting to decimate or un-subdivide your meshes before exporting them from Blender. Or you're just not decimating enough.
You might assume that higher-poly parts and clothing might look or deform better in FVNE, but they actually really don't. If anything, high-poly meshes take longer for FVNE to calculate when loading and posing, and they really don't deform any better, so you're degrading your character's performance for no actual benefit. And once the interaction system is implemented, I imagine this problem will only be more irritating.
It's true that higher-poly meshes can be much easier to sculpt and paint in Blender, but once you're done with the shaping and texturing, there's generally no good reason not to decimate the mesh before exporting. You may have to make a few minor adjustments here and there, but we're talking seconds of work here.
The default mesh for a blank character in FVNE has about 50,000 triangles. Unless you're making something more complicated than an entire full body mesh, you shouldn't be reaching triangle counts anywhere near that high for any single part or garment. I personally try to aim for a triangle count under 5,000 for most average sized parts and garments, and I'm able to upload characters dressed head to toe (even with undergarments) without disabling a thing. Meanwhile, I keep seeing characters with only one or two garments that add up to over 100,000 triangles.
In short, if your character's miniskirt and tank top are adding up to double the triangles of their entire body mesh, just remember: Decimation is your friend!
If you're exceeding the triangle limit when trying to upload a character, you're probably forgetting to decimate or un-subdivide your meshes before exporting them from Blender. Or you're just not decimating enough.
You might assume that higher-poly parts and clothing might look or deform better in FVNE, but they actually really don't. If anything, high-poly meshes take longer for FVNE to calculate when loading and posing, and they really don't deform any better, so you're degrading your character's performance for no actual benefit. And once the interaction system is implemented, I imagine this problem will only be more irritating.
It's true that higher-poly meshes can be much easier to sculpt and paint in Blender, but once you're done with the shaping and texturing, there's generally no good reason not to decimate the mesh before exporting. You may have to make a few minor adjustments here and there, but we're talking seconds of work here.
The default mesh for a blank character in FVNE has about 50,000 triangles. Unless you're making something more complicated than an entire full body mesh, you shouldn't be reaching triangle counts anywhere near that high for any single part or garment. I personally try to aim for a triangle count under 5,000 for most average sized parts and garments, and I'm able to upload characters dressed head to toe (even with undergarments) without disabling a thing. Meanwhile, I keep seeing characters with only one or two garments that add up to over 100,000 triangles.
In short, if your character's miniskirt and tank top are adding up to double the triangles of their entire body mesh, just remember: Decimation is your friend!
Comments
Tanks @mobiusscarf , you really speak from my heart and soul!
I have a little something up here for everyone since I didn't cover this on my tutorial in detail.
What comes next is a really important point so please check it out:
This is the base heel model I used on my Aurelia on the last update and you can tell by adding a decimate modifier that it has 4167 faces, however it isn't even mirrored to the second foot yet so double that count and we'll have 8334 which is way to much. But this isn't even the real deal because what we count here are the faces. FVNE however is counting triangles which is an entirely different thing!
In order to show the triangles we tick the box and change the slider to 0,99 and you'll get this:
I just set the ratio to 0.4 and you can't even tell a big difference on the mesh surface but the faces for both heels are now at 5864. That's something we can work with. You could go even lower and depending on what mesh you have sometimes UN-subdividing looks better than collapsing the mesh but you'll get the hang of it. Maybe even combine the two options and UN-subdivede once, then go to the collapse tool and finish it up.
Last thing I want to say is that I managed to build up an entire roster of characters within the triangle limits and some of them have three layers of clothes on them, so it is really doable if you want to.