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By martok2112 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi, all.
I love working with Blender, 3DExchange, Character Creator 3, and iClone. I love that it allows me to bring my ideas to visual fruition, even though I'm nowhere near as skilled as many of the talented artists here.
One thing I have noticed though,.... iProps that have been converted from .objs through 3DExchange tend to be quite a bit problematic once the conversion is done. I'll use wireframes of my Death Star City Sprawl as an example.
Death Star City Sprawl .obj wireframe in Blender
 Only 252 KB .obj. / 202B mtl. Wow, kept it at around a quarter of a megabyte.
Death Star City Sprawl wireframe in iClone 7 after 3DExchange 7 conversion.
 iProp is 2.42MB. (let's check that again....yep... MEGABYTES!)
As you can see, once the conversion is done, 3DExchange adds a LOT of messy geometry to the converted mesh. This tends to make the iProp a bit....umm...memory intensive..as evidenced in the images and makes for some pretty impossible stage large set ups, (I was trying to make a Death Star surface and trench comprised of a couple variants of City Sprawls...and 2.42MB meshes do tend to add up...QUICK!) unless I am doing something wrong in the conversion, and as far as I know, I am not. I always check my models in Blender before exporting them. (remove duplicate vertices, smoothing, checking normals, exporting textures, etc), and when they come into 3DExchange, they pretty much look intact. (Might need a little auto-smoothing, but beyond that, the meshes ususally look pretty good.) Then 3DExchange does its work, and even though the mesh may look visually nice in iClone, in topology it is a freaking mess. In Tesselation mode, the wireframe does indeed look neater, but it still has TONS of additional and unnecessary topology added.
 Quads become triangles.
So, why all the extra (and shoddy) topology? What can I do to eliminate this? Or do you think at some point in the future, iClone will eventually be able to just start using .obj files.
Thanks in advance,
Friendly Neighborhood Martok.
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By Kelleytoons - 6 Years Ago
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Hmmm, going to guess it's something to do with the way you model or something very specific to Blender.
When I bring in an OBJ from Daz that is around 12MB (not including textures) the same iProp comes out to be around 17MB WITH textures (you can't export without ANY textures so those are the lowest I could export). That seems fine to me. Now, if I round off the corners and weld vertices I get around 24MB, but I would expect it to double doing those things (so you should try without doing that).
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By 4u2ges - 6 Years Ago
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That is an iClone 7 and/or 3DX bug I suppose: https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost414559.aspx
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By martok2112 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi, Kelley.
As you can see in my Blender wireframe, my model is really clean. All verts, edges, faces nice and neat. As I stated before, I also check to make sure my normals are outward facing, eliminate duplicate vertices, etc...everything I can think of to make sure it is a clean mesh. Even in older 3DExchange versions, they've always added extra topology which ramps up the memory size of the object/prop in question. I just never understood why that was necessary.
I am going to try another technique in the future though:
See, in order to ensure my best possible boolean generations, edge cuts, extrusions, etc, I do always give the source primitive (usually a cube or a plane) a decent amount of subdivision for topology. If you don't have enough topology, your boolean cuts might end up not translating properly, and you end up with "phantom faces", which I believe I discussed perhaps a year or two ago. However, once the topology has been established, and the boolean cuts or the extrusions are made, I'm going to see about reducing the face count where I can on the mesh. Hopefully that might remove some of the problems, but I'm not exactly trusting on that.
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By martok2112 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi, 4u2ges,
Yeah, I think the wireframes end up looking horribly shoddy in iClone 7 (in original mode). If I switch to tesselation mode, it looks much neater, but still has a lot of unnecessary topology added to the mesh in conversion. In previous 3DExchange versions, the meshes did look much neater, but still were given a lot of extraneous topology, again, ramping up the memory size of the object/prop in question.
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By Kelleytoons - 6 Years Ago
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Then it probably comes down to the fact that iClone (and all associated programs) are optimized for "round" edges -- let's face it, the platform is for character animation. We wouldn't want it any different. If this means that things with a lot of "sharp" edges aren't optimized that's a tradeoff that most of us don't mind.
I'd be interested to see you making a Blender model with mostly rounded edges and see how the sizes compare there.
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By martok2112 - 6 Years Ago
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Actually, I do have some Federation starship models that I could check that theory out on, Kelley. I'll let you know when I get to reconverting them for iClone 7. :)
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By 4u2ges - 6 Years Ago
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OK, it is 3DX Auto Smooth causes the problem with messy wire frame geometry display (but that does not affect the prop size - it is a different issue)
Anything I bring from Blender is alright up until I run it through Auto Smooth in 3DExchange.
Here is very simple object:
Now to the size. Tested the same Blender made prop with iClone 7 and iClone 6:
FBX Blender prop - 308 Kb
After saving to iProp:
iClone 7:
Not Smoothed in 3DX - 1.1 Mb
Smoothed in 3DX - 1.2 Mb
iClone 6:
Not Smoothed in 3DX - 673 Kb
Smoothed in 3DX - 793 Kb
Obviously 3DX Auto Smoothing splits vertices at sharp edges and the size is slightly higher.
But overall iClone 6 iProp doubles the size of the original FBX and iClone 7 quadruples.
Suppose iProp stores some move specific to iClone information... but to such extend?
Never payed much attention to it though....
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By martok2112 - 6 Years Ago
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Good examples provided there, 4u2ges. :)
I might just have to see if I can smooth out the edges and such in Blender to the point where it's not necessary in 3DExchange, although that does add a bit of memory size to the Blender mesh at the Blender end, but I think it won't be near as engorging as it would if it was smoothed in 3DX.
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