We’re looking for a good way to decimate our characters while keeping our skinned data. I see that Maya LT generates LODs this way but we’re not looking to pull another license just to generate a few character models.
Is there external tools that lets Maya 2016 do this or should I think about writing my own?
Would anyone have any good suggestions on how to accomplish this?
i am not familiar with maya LT feature set, but i would be surprised if LT had features that were not in maya itself.
anyway, you could try a combination of “Mesh > Reduce” with “Skin > Substitute Geometry” and put the results in a LOD Group (Edit > LOD > Create LOD Group)
Yeah, I was supprised as well. But it seems LOD Generation is more of a Game feature, so it would make sense to put it in the proper edition: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya-lt/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/MayaLT/files/GUID-95F6A84C-7C38-4EEC-84D6-A2E424D3609B-htm.html
Maya 2016 has a system for LOD but it seems to just be for rendering and uses the distance of the camera to create them. I was not successful in creating a LOD mesh when I was using the LOD Group; Am I doing something wrong?
Maya’s LOD Group node tools just creates the heirarcy, it doesnt create models for you.
You’ll need to run the Mesh >Reduce tool on your original model to create the reduced meshes, and then find a way to transfer your skinning data to the new models.
once you have the models and weighting, then create the LOD Group and put your models in and set the distances.
Perfect, I will give this a try! Thanks!
It looks like the Generate LOD Meshes tool is actually new for 2017, and not restricted to LT in any way.
Ah, yeah unfortunately we are only licensed to 2016 