I have a HUGE scene and it's causing me problems (slow refresh, sluggish response time, glacial renders).

The background mountains PROP (not rigged figure) do not need to be highly detailed.

Could I use Hexagon (or another app) to decrease the poly count of the OBJ file and swap them out? Would that work? Or will it mess up the textures or other things?

If this is a bad path, is there something else I could do?

You could try to reduce the polygons and see how it would affect the texture map. I would save it as a different obj though to avoid any issues. Then I would add the new mountains to my scene and remove the old ones, copying any shaders first of course.

I've also found hiding most things in the scene works well to improve response time. That won't help with render times, but response times while working with the scene drastically improve. I'd also look at other things in your scene and look at those polys. I find trees are another source of slowdown. (I'm assuming with mountains, it's an outdoor scene) Unfortunately, those seem to need to be high poly.

I believe Blender (free) can decimate while keeping the UVs (so you don't have to deal with fixing textures/materials).

One approach could be:

1. Open the prop file in a text editor (notepad++ or similar), If geometry is not embedded inside you should find a reference to the OBJ/OBZ file;
2. Go to that location, usually at "Runtime:Geometries" or something;
3. Make a backup of the original OBJ/OBZ, to restore back later if you want. If it was OBZ use Poser script/utilities menu to decompress as OBJ;
4. Now you import the original in Blender, apply the decimate modifier in a way that preserves the UVs (see for example https://medium.com/@ilkyal3d/how-to-preserve-uvs-when-using-decimate-modifier-1bc769b64618);
5. Once done export as OBJ overwriting the original and you are good to go.

Other references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwldHToYGt4

Take a look at Groups.

RedPhantom posted at 7:16 AM Sat, 25 May 2024 - #4485268

I've also found hiding most things in the scene works well to improve response time. That won't help with render times, but response times while working with the scene drastically improve. I'd also look at other things in your scene and look at those polys. I find trees are another source of slowdown. (I'm assuming with mountains, it's an outdoor scene) Unfortunately, those seem to need to be high poly.

THANKS. Hiding stuff does help with the response time! Yup... lots of trees. Hiding them REALLY helped. I even removed a cliff that I kinda liked, but wasn't really essential to the composition. That cut some polygons from the scene.

Zaycrow posted at 12:29 PM Sat, 25 May 2024 - #4485280

Take a look at Groups.

I don't understand what you mean. Could you please elaborate?

EVargas posted at 9:34 AM Sat, 25 May 2024 - #4485274

I believe Blender (free) can decimate while keeping the UVs (so you don't have to deal with fixing textures/materials).

THANKS! I really appreciate the time you took to write out such detailed instructions. Last night I did something similar to what you wrote, but I used Hexagon (already had it installed). It worked on the polys, but blew the UVs away and I couldn't really get any textures to work well after that. I'll read the references you sent me and see if Blender can work for me.

My approach was different in that I duplicated the cr2 file, renamed it and then edited it in Notepad++ to reference the newly created low-res copy of the OBJ file. This approach allowed me to experiment without mucking up the older versions of the file and prop. As I noted in a post above, though, the UVs were blown away and I wound up trying other approaches to simplify the scene.

Dang those trees!

If I cannot get this to work, I'm going to give the Blender method a shot.

Thank you again VERY MUCH!

Another trick to keep in mind. if the trees are located in places where the tops won't show, you can use just trunks. It's all the leaves that raise the polygons.

Poser\ main menu\ object\ reduce polygons.

Object/Create Grouping. That will add a group in your Hierarchy editor and you can drag and drop content from your scene in that Group - or Groups. Then you can hide that group(s) from the scene. I use it all the time for big scenes.

To decimate a figure - Figure/Reduce polygons.

To decimate an Object - Object/Reduce polygons

Zaycrow posted at 1:25 PM Wed, 5 June 2024 - #4485770

Object/Create Grouping. That will add a group in your Hierarchy editor and you can drag and drop content from your scene in that Group - or Groups. Then you can hide that group(s) from the scene. I use it all the time for big scenes.

To decimate a figure - Figure/Reduce polygons.

To decimate an Object - Object/Reduce polygons

Oh good grief, how did I miss those options? I seriously need to spend a day just going through all of the menu settings and confirming that I know what's what.

That being said... I used that option to reduce polygons, and it did, but it didn't seem to improve performance much. I clearly need to investigate what's going on in this scene in more detail. 

RedPhantom posted at 6:47 AM Sun, 26 May 2024 - #4485304

Another trick to keep in mind. if the trees are located in places where the tops won't show, you can use just trunks. It's all the leaves that raise the polygons.

This is a forest scene with a large expanse of area shown. I'm seriously considering hiding all of the trees, rendering them separately, and then adding them in post-production. I've been messing around with this scene for far too long.

Render batches of these trees, grouped by distance from camera, on transparent background and use them as billboard props.