#Blender mesh clean up decimate geometry how to

Well planar acts exactly like limited dissolve and you can slide that around and you can see that it's just trying to find the general 3D contours of the mesh and keep them around. Now, if you remember, we use a tool called limited dissolve. So you see what's happening here is depending on what mode of decimating you're using, collapse, or unsubdivide, you could really destroy your UVs. And if I undo that, say just go to two, Apply, oh my gosh, they're getting even worse. Let's apply that, Tab, it's starting to get kind of red. Even if I do unsubdivide, I'll go to something crazy like five, there we go. So I can undo that, so let's do that really quick. You know, they still maintain their shape. We're going to apply, hit Tab, and hey, look at that, my UVs are pretty good. So we have all of these UVs that are nicely laid out and the best part about it, let's go back to something crazy. So you're going to want to make sure you generated them. Now if you don't see any of these, remember when you made the monkey, hit T, you should have clicked on generate UVs. Tab and you can see right away, we have a whole bunch of UVs nicely laid out. Let's click on this little guy, image editor. Now there's another thing I want to mention about decimate and why I like it so much. So unsubdivide is really handy, especially if you get meshes from other programs that already had subdivision supplied. Three can be pretty good, two can be really good. And it isn't perfect, but it is pretty good. The first one, it doesn't work so well, but when you get to even numbers, you almost can't tell you subdivided the thing in the first place. Unsubdivide will use a little bit of math to find where you left your subdivisions and get rid of them. Now this is the one I think you're going to use quite a bit of. The next tool that's also handy is unsubdivide. So if you really want to you could get all the way down to say 83 faces and have this weird pseudo monkey. Pretty handy, and you can even see a read out down below as to what's happening and how many faces you have left. It's trying to find where the vertices are the closest and merge them. If I just drag this over here you can see right away what's happening. Now decimate, unlike dissolve, is going to go ahead and merge things with collapse. And then let's go to Modifiers and let's add a Decimate modifier. You'll see a few of them are hidden so you can always click on draw all edges to make sure you get all of them in there. Wire is pretty cool because it's going to show you all of the edges on the monkey.

Click on Object, and let's click on Wire.

Let's get out of edit mode, zoom in a little bit. Tab, W, Subdivide smooth, you can cut it a couple of times and you can fiddle with some of these settings if you really want to to make it a little cool. This is important, click on Generate UVs, we're going to need those later. First, let's start by deleting this cube.

This week we're going to look at a new tool called decimate and why I think it could be an integral part of your mesh cleaning work flow.

#Blender mesh clean up decimate geometry how to

In last weeks Blenders Tips, Tricks, and Techniques, we talked about how to use dissolve to clean up your meshes.