Plasticity X Blender - Voxel Remesh Workflow

General / 29 May 2024

After receiving multiple questions about the voxel remesh workflow, and how I was working with plasticity, I decided to write this article. 

The goal is to create a fast (but good) high poly from a high resolution mesh exported from our CAD software.
The idea of the workflow is the same as described in an older article, but I'll share new, updated export values for Plasticity and Moi3D and show how you can achieve similar results within Blender.

Since quite some times now, I've been using the following paid addon for the voxel remesh: BLACK MESH

Why are you using this addon ? Because, in my opinion (and after doing tests), the voxel remesh with Blender's modifier is pretty heavy in terms of resources, you're getting a lot of long computing time freezes. Except if you have a really, really high end PC. Black Mesh is doing some magic in the background and allowing you to remove, almost completely, these long computing freezes. 


For the vanilla/free version of the voxel remesher in Blender, I recommend you the following video of Tim Bergholz:



Now, let's jump into the process. 

Ia. Plasticity Export

When you're done with your CAD model, you need to export a really high resolution OBJ mesh from Plasticity, these are the settings I'm using to get enough topology in every area, avoiding any shading issues with the voxel remesher:

Thanks to Pascual Hernandez for sharing the settings initially.

You can see that we have a good topology density everywhere on the mesh. Now, for some models, it might be overkill, but for the meshes with some weird curved area, you'll need that density to avoid any shading issues like here:

As you can see, by using different results, we're getting a lot less topology in this curved area, and you can see on the left that we have slight edge shading issues. It might look small on the high poly, but it will be more visible with baking.

Ib. Moi3D Export

Here's the updated moi3D export setting to get a similar density on your meshes:

Thanks to Cohen Brawley for sharing these settings.


II. Blender Voxel Remesher

Now that our mesh is correctly exported, let's import it into Blender and remesh it. 

Here's the Black Mesh's values, which I'm using in general:

Here's a process video to demonstrate the speed of the addon/process:


Here's the result before(left) / after(right):

We can see that the remeshed one could use some decimation master/reduction of topology in the flat areas. You can do that by adding a decimate modifier and trying to get it more optimized, personally, I'm facing some freeze by doing so, maybe the latest Blender's version is more stable, I'm still in 3.6 after all. 

I hope this small guide was useful and clear enough to understand the CAD/Voxel Remesher workflow.

Have fun!

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