#Best free polygon reduction tool update#

This is useful to exactly preserve border edges where surfaces meet.

Setting any option in the Feature Preservation section of the Reduce Options to 1.0 ensures that those components are not modified by the reduction.

If you are painting reduce weights and want to revert a region back to its original state, you can either undo your paint strokes or simply flood the mesh with black color.

When this occurs, reduce the Preserve quads slider value.

The Preserve quads option can produce distorted results in some situations.

Reduce works with quads and n-sided polygons, however, non-planar polygons can become deformed and may not reduce well.

In some extreme cases polygons that you painted white but are not needed will still be reduced to preserve shape elsewhere. Reduce Weights are a bias, not an absolute control.

#Best free polygon reduction tool update#

If you want the reduced version to update as you paint, choose Modify > Paint Attributes Tool >, and then in Paint Attributes Tool Options, open the Stroke section and turn on Update continuously. This is because the reduce operation can take a noticeable amount of time on large meshes.

When you are painting reduce weights, the Paint Attributes Tool default is to only update when you finish a stroke.

Turn on the Mesh borders option so the extracted mesh can be reattached later. You can avoid this effect by extracting the polygons from the mesh before reducing them.

When you select faces to reduce (rather than reducing the entire mesh), faces bordering the selection may move or be reduced as well.

If you try to paint reduce weights on the reduced version, Maya automatically selects the original instead. You must use the Keep original option and paint on the original object.

You cannot paint reduce weights on the reduced version.

Set the reduction percentage, target number of vertices, or target number of triangles and turn on Keep original, then click Reduce.

In the Modeling menu set, select Mesh > Reduce >.

To get finer control over which areas are reduced using the Paint Reduce Weights Tool Painting a region for reduction using the Paint Reduce Weights Tool gives you finer control over the polygon reduction as well as blend between the areas where less reduction occurs. You can also use the Artisan paint feature to specify a region on the polygon mesh you want to have the polygons reduced. In the Reduce Options window, select Automatic or Plane from the Symmetry type drop-down list. The reduced mesh will appear next to the original along the X axis. In the Reduce Options window, turn on the Keep original option. Keep the current polygon mesh so you can compare the original and reduced versions as you change options.

Select the faces you want to reduce, then choose Mesh > Reduce >. This lets you experiment with the amount of blend reduction and can be removed altogether should you wish to return the polygon mesh to its original pre-reduced state. The polygon reduction is controlled via a polyReduce node that gets created. Overall, polygon models that have been simplified will have less data and improved interactive performance when animated in the scene view. Another example would be to simplify a polygon data set of a detailed physical model that was 3D laser scanned. For example, you may need to create a low resolution copy of a high resolution polygon model with a reduced polygon count for level of detail display purposes in an interactive video game. Reducing the number of polygons is useful when you need to reduce the overall polygon count in a polygon mesh or reduce the number of polygons in a particular region of the mesh. The Reduce feature also attempts to retain the original shape as part of the reduction process. The Reduce feature lets you automatically reduce the number of polygons in a mesh by a percentage of the overall polygon count, a target number of vertices, or a target number of triangles that you specify.