Hi, Rented-Spaceling! I'm working on a hair mesh with curves in Blender... the result has reached so incredible an amount of polycount that it will not even be imported into Milkshape. Do you happen to know a nice way to reduce polycount in Blender without losing a lot of details?
Hi mazexworld! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you!
Blender has a few options on reducing polycount; you can find it under the properties menu; make sure you’re in “object mode” before clicking the little icon that looks like a wrench and open up the “Add Modifier” menu:
Look for the “Decimate” option:
Decimate will give you three options: Option 1 is “Collapse” and check “Triangulate” to avoid ending up with quad faces. As you can see, you can control the ratio to lower the polycount; however it’s not the cleanest of reductions and may require some “cleaning” up to smooth out some of the blips.
Option 2 is “Un-Subdivide”; this doesn’t really give the best results either, so I rarely ever use this one.
And the last option is “Planar”; while it’s a little better at keeping the shape, it can have mixed results depending on the complexity of your hair shape.
All three can give different results depending on the complexity and shape of your hair, so you can play around and see which one suits your needs best :)
Personally, I prefer to reduce the count by hand, which is extremely tedious but I’m able to keep the shape of the hair and don’t have to fuss with cleaning up stray vertices afterwards.
Sorry if I’m not good at explaining things, but I hope this helps! ^^