We’ve been using Blender in our pipeline for over a year now, and it clearly cannot handle texturing of meshes larger than 1 million tris, even on the bare metal with 16 cores, 8Gb GPU, etc. You know the drill, so I won’t waste time with details. It just doesn’t work – period. Anyone that works with photogrammetry and large, complex meshes will undersand.
Since this is a Blender forum, I presume others that have serious workflows (i.e. high throughout, large meshes) eventually come to the conclusion that external software is required for texturing. Please provide some suggestions and advice on what has worked for you.
Obviously, Blender is not an option, as it is not reasonable to wait 5-10 minutes to paint a few centimeters of a 900,000 tri mesh (or more than an hour to unwrap it). Nor is manipulating meshes, in general, an option in Blender given it’s backend processing algorithms are several orders more primitive than even the most basic tools such as Meshlab (you know the benchmarks, let’s not argue).
We are just exasperated at all the time wasted due to lack of design and potential for true parallel processing and utilization of GPU and are looking for suggestions on what software you are using for real-world, serious texturing applications. We have tried Houdini, but it suffers from feature bloat and, in general, inability to accomplish basic tasks without tacking on 10x the necessary procedures.
Blender has some reasonably useful features, so we don’t want to completely kick it to the curb, but there is absolutely no way in the Universe it could be used by anyone for any reason for complex texturing, and this is a hard fact. Let’s talk options.