I am experimenting with project all and the projection brush to try and simplify the greenman mesh. currently its in two pieces that have been combined using insert mesh and the clay brushes, however this seems like it will be a pain to render in mental ray, I don't think the subD approximation is going to like two heavy peices of geometry that have been smeared together, plus I keep running into problems when I smooth the seams. So (after sitting in on Ryan Kingslien's lecture at Gnomon last night) I decided to try wrapping a single polysphere around the original mesh. i used project all and the projection brush to make the polysphere match the original. I'm still tweaking some areas but so far its working really well. the image below shows the original on the left and the projected mesh on the right. On the close up on the bottom you can see the differences in topology, the projected mesh, while not organized, lacks the nasty seams seen in the original. My guess is that mental ray will like the project mesh better, we'll see.
What's interesting is that this technique could be used to rebuild complex protein structures that are too heavy for Maya. Way back when I used the old shrink wrap mel script and some extensive ZBrush editing to create a simplified ribosome from the original crystal structure. The project all/projection brush technique is faster and more accurate (although it still involves a fair amount of work). Maybe if I ever have time I'll do a tutorial for molecular movies...
