What is the best polygon reduction software available ?

[Jason Amstrad]

What is the best polygon reduction software/tool available ?
How good are your experiences with them ?

[ffejnosliw]

I'm going to guess most programmers' experiences with polygon reduction software are not too good. Please, try to post in the appropriate forum for your topic.

Moved to Mdeling and Skinning.

[Chosker]

anyone that considers himself a decent artist knows not only that these softwares don't work well, but a decent artist creates meshes without the need for reduction.

and if you want a decent-looking game, you need a decent artist

[hellslayer]

Polygon or Vertreductions are useful if you want to bring a highpoly from maybe zbrush to Max. But in this example, zbrush already has a very good reduction Plugin.
However if you are looking for a Retopo Tool you may google for Topogun if you want something standalone.
A lot 3d packages have buildin good retopo tools already. After that you can use x-normals, zbrush.. ect to get the highpoly details back.

[darthviper107]

Your hands--the results you would get with any tool that reduces the number of polygons will make the model unsuitable for use.

[MasonThird]

http://www.atangeo.com/

This one is pretty good.

[Jason Amstrad]

http://www.atangeo.com/

Have you had good experiences with it ?
Did it work for you in a commercial-production environment ?
Did it really produce optimized models and not make things worse ?

[darthviper107]

The issue with stuff like that is that it destroys your topology and edge flow--especially for things that need to be animated like characters you can't just have it look like the character, if you have edges in the wrong place it'll mess up when it starts animating.

[jamiet]

http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

Meshlab FTW

[Jason Amstrad]

Is Meshlab very good ?

[jamiet]

yeah its pretty good.. it basically decimates high poly 3d scans etc to something more manageable.. you can also fix zero area faces, non uniform faces etc.. Like mentioned above it won't do topology that is 'ideal'..

above all it's open source and works on extremely high poly counts.. worth a look for sure..

[Kyle_Katarn]

Your hands--the results you would get with any tool that reduces the number of polygons will make the model unsuitable for use.

+1 on the hands. It's also not what you think, going through a 100,000 poly mesh and deleting edge loop by edge loop, try looking for a good Retopology program, which allow you to take your high-poly mesh, and drop vertices down in just the way you want.

[marcus]

Do it yourself manually,
sorry but that really is the best option available.

And if you find it impossible to bring a a very high poly character or whatever mesh back to the polygon count you want, it would still be better to have a decent/good 3d artist build you a low poly version from the ground up, using the high poly model as reference.

[darthviper107]

+1 on the hands. It's also not what you think, going through a 100,000 poly mesh and deleting edge loop by edge loop, try looking for a good Retopology program, which allow you to take your high-poly mesh, and drop vertices down in just the way you want.

A retopology program doesn't reduce polygon counts--it allows you to essentially model over your mesh, so all the vertices you place will stick snap to the surface of your model, so you can quickly remodel with a good topology without having to spend a lot of time moving points as close to the surface as possible.

[frostymoss]

Meshlab is cool, but unstable in my experience. Maybe one day meshlab can be used to create a genetic optimizing solution with machine learning plugin for max.