Optimizing 3d meshes? Thread

What do people use for optimizing 3d meshes?

I've been working in blender and I can use decimate all I want but it doesn't give a good feeling and it causes textures to stretch alot of the times. I also have been looking into solutions also and came upon this late night Simplygon.com it is free for hobbyist and people with under 25k income per quarter. So its perfect for indie guys like us.

I work in unity also, has anyone found a good solution for that yet? I'm going to simple lod tonight.

High poly to Normal map on low poly works good.

Also most of the time a high poly (as far as it is not TOO high) is more than fine, Modern GPU can handle a lot, they just tend to suck if you call too many times (so stick everything into as less calls as possible).

The stretching is meant to happen, usually when you lower the poly of a model, you are supposed to re-texture it with a lower res texture;
It also makes more sense too, when the camera is far away and you use LOD because all those details are no longer necessary, why would you still want to use a high-res texture? Even if it wouldn't stretch, it still would be a waste.

I understand what you're talking about. Many times I create a high poly model and later need a low poly model to project the high onto. If you only have the high model, and you try to optimize, or decimate in blender it looks like S##t and usually ends up not very friendly for rigging. What I used is ZBrush....unfortunately it isn't free, but thy have a modifier called a ZRemesher which allows you to put "guides" on your model that tell it where the loops will travel along. Oh, and it only makes perfect quads. Here is a YouTube video on how it is done. I do not know if Blender has anything remotely like this, or any other package for that matter.

Hope this helps you, sorry I can't provide a "free" tool option

Sincerely,

www.RandellTrulson.com

I use this for my models
Meshlab.net
It's Open Source, maintained, and gives one the option to optimize on specific areas.

Topogun is slightly expensive at $100 for a single user license. It has a demo license (no saving) available to learn upon: Topogun.com

Most 3D programs have tools to retoplogize your model such as ZBrush's Zremesher. These automated processes are CPU intensive and tend to have meh results at best. Topogun can handle high resolution meshes and provides simple tools to build new geometry for your low resolution mesh without demanding so much out of your processor.