Ballancer wish list

12 replies [Last post]
Demostenes
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Joined: 02/26/2011

Ballancer is really great SW, especially for such price. It has by far the best decimation from "indie priced" SW. That is the reason why I bought it. Anyway I have few ideas, about improvements:

-automatic normal map generation (projection from high poly to low poly)
-automatic deleting of interiors (inner structure).
-texture and mesh merging (join several meshes/submeshes and especially textures into one)

I know that this is really BIG, but I would pay for ballancer 20x more, if it can do this Smile Everything I mentioned can be done in 3D modelling SW (even decimation), but this is about time saving. Automatizing such process can save thousands of hours. Only SW capabale of such complex LOD generation is Simplygon and its price is astronomical.

JackJack
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Joined: 04/18/2009

Thanks for your kind words, for your ideas
and for purchasing Balancer.

We definitely plan to gradually add all those features
in the future versions of Balancer. We can't say right now
when exactly, but we hope that they will appear in the near
future along with other big improvements Smile

Dreamcube017
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Joined: 06/09/2010

I would also like to suggest (as I did in another thread) an option for deleting parts, submeshes, or indevidual faces. That would be wonderful.

Balancer really is a great product.

anadin
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Joined: 06/15/2011

I really like it too - very impressive, is it possible for it to work in quads and not triangulate my mesh?

JackJack
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Joined: 04/18/2009

anadin,
I am glad to hear you like Balancer.

In general, it is much more difficult to get
quad meshes that are as good as the original models,
since quads should be aligned and reflect the structure
of the model. Otherwise, the quad mesh will look even
worse than the triangle mesh.

We have some promising directions for quad mesh simplification,
but currently we does not have short term plans to start working
on this.

Hope you will find Balancer useful even with triangulated
simplification only.

Dreamcube017
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Joined: 06/09/2010

Triangle meshes are fine, just make sure you have your texture work done before hand... OR... you can reduce with balancer and then just redo the UV map and you should be ok for textureing.

I use 3D Coat and rather than using the topology tool, I just export it straight out and then redo the UV map in something else and reduce with balancer. (mainly because I'm somewhat unclear about the polygon tools in there) but still, it works.

I think the only time I (and someone else) would have a problem is when they have a really high poly character with morphs. If you export both and try to reduce them, the polygon arrangment is different, so you couldn't blend the morphs anymore. You'll have to recreate the morphs on the lowpoly character. But for everything else, Balancer is wonderful.

3dworks
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Joined: 09/03/2011

the new screen pixel based simplification is great, however i would like to suggest an improvement.

would it be possible to add an option which looks at the actual balancer viewport perspective and zoom to calculate the resolution needs? this way it would be easy to simplify a model also for close-up shots. on the practical side, the user just would need to setup the closest position for a particular animation/ shot of the object in a scene by eyballing the zoom and perspective in the balancer viewport. balancer would then use this information in conjunction with the screen resolution to calculate the needed resolution of the mesh...

does this make sense?

cheers

markus

JackJack
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Joined: 04/18/2009

Thanks for your idea, Markus!

As I see it, you mean that in addition to a specific viewport,
the user could chose "Use current view" together with his
preferred error in pixels to quantify simplification quality.
The problem that this setting depends on the user display size,
resolution, DPI spec etc.
But as an additional option, it could be great and useful indeed.

I think we can add this into the next minor release.

Nostre
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Joined: 04/22/2010

I would like update to the new version nPro but I think your tool is becoming to lose some
compatibility like .DAE or .FBX Wink

3d4medical
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Joined: 03/02/2012

HI, Great software !! i have to admit i am using it all the time.
I mainly fork with hundreds of small objects and i was thinking that would be great to see an option to select the objects in viewport instead on the side list, because for some reasons those names are random, there is no order like from A to Z, so maybe simple ordering by name or size would be great improvement for projects with many objects.
Thank you.

3d4medical
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Joined: 03/02/2012

1 more think came to my mind...
It would be great to Paint verticles (for locking them) instead selecting them vert by vert because its a bit big pain to select let say 100 verts , i have to be very accurate to bo able to select 1 vert.
thx.

Demostenes
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Joined: 02/26/2011

-automatic normal map generation (projection from high poly to low poly)
-automatic deleting of interiors (inner structure).
-texture and mesh merging (join several meshes/submeshes and especially textures into one)

Hello,

is there any progress with these featues? Especially making texture atlas and merging materials into 1 is very beneficial for higher LODs. Nowdays I would add one more feature, decimation of skinned meshes.

Best,

Jiri

JackJack
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Joined: 04/18/2009

Thanks again for your ideas.
We are working on the next major version that will include most of the features you asked.
Skinned meshes will be supported as soon as we add FBX and Collada support.

Best regards