Reducing polygons... Thread

What options are available that:

• Keep original UV's so existing texture still works
• Reduce mesh faces
• Keep animations intact

I found Blender 2.49b has a "Polygon reducer" script that wasn't ported to future versions. And it works great for reducing polygons and keeping the UV's intact so the texture still lines up. But it drops my animations.....So I can only use it for inanimate objects...In the newer versions I can use decimate modifier, but it screws the Uv's so the texture no longer works, but keeps the animations...it's really frustrating.
What other options can import a .dae or .3ds with animations and texture, reduce the faces and export to fbx, .dae, or .3ds??

If the loops are already decent (actual loops) and the number that you have to remove isn't insane (like a highres sculpt), then you could probably get away with selecting them by hand and cleaning them up manually. I'm not overly familiar with what Blender has for reducing polygons; if you can get ahold of the old free XSI Modtool it has a great polygon reduction tool that would preserve the UVs, envelope weights, and give plenty of options over how and where the faces ares removed.

Are your animations via armatures or shapes? If it's done with armatures then you should be able to re-parent your mesh to your armature and don't name bone groups as they should already exist.

I actually found unwrap3d pro does it all really nicely so I'm just going to buy it. I downloaded the trial and it was very nice.

The animations are via armatures, I'll read up on it, I didn't rig them I bought them so they're more complicated than my level of knowledge.

If you just manually delete edge loops that are not on UV-shell borders you will be fine.
However, reducing geometry on an already skinned, rigged and animated model is risky, because you might get unwanted stretching and/or clipping.