Advanced Features

The Linteum Character Tool contains features which can help clean your meshes and make them more useful.

Hidden Surface Removal

Available under Hidden Surfaces > Hidden Surface Removal from the Character Builder.

This feature scans the fully assembled mesh for areas where the underlying body shape may be poking through clothing items, possibly as a result of decimation or other modifications to the mesh. This process can be quite slow (up to several minutes), but should produce a cleaner mesh overall, and can be used for final production quality meshes.

Decimation Features

The Linteum Character Tool has a fully featured rigging-aware decimator built in. Not every result it generates will be perfect, but it can do a pretty good job at reducing polygon counts to acceptable levels.

Like all decimators, it will produce more impressive results on larger single surfaces than it will on smaller fine details. In addition, you will see better results moving from 100,000 polygons to 25,000 than you will from 10,000 to 2,500. Finally, we recommend using the Hidden Surface Removal tool (see above) when combining decimation with morphs that significantly alter the character's shape, as decimation may expose stretched elements further.

Below is a quick example of the decimator in action with quality set to 100% (far left), ≈50% (middle) and ≈14% (far right).

Drawbacks to Decimating

Decimating will not produce results comparable to a human rebuilding an item at a lower poly count, but the overall results can be fairly good.

Decimating can introduce artifacts into the results. This can include loose polygons, or more commonly, shifted textures due to a resulting change in the UVs, particularly if the UVs vary texel density. The Linteum version has been weighted to try minimize these issues, but if you do not get good results, try tweaking the decimation level up and down to see if you can produce better results.