I didn’t find a way to select all seams at once later on in Blender so I assigned every new seam to a vertex group before hitting Mark Seam.Cut the body vertically at both sides or in the center (belly button).

If you need to adjust UVs manually it is easier to detect the right position.

Take the edges where material changes.

Again there is no one and only rule but a few hints: The only way to get a good mapping is by creating the right seams. I found the Smart UV Project is performing pretty well for easy and more static models, but for my human model this is useless.

Don’t put too much effort on face modeling because texture and normal map help you to gain an acceptable quality.

So your knees and elbows for example will be easier to manage while skinning the rig for animation. Take care for all joints your model will need later on.If regions of the high poly model that use textures via UV mapping can be reflected on the low poly vertex setup, it helps on UV mapping.This will save time later for UV mapping and baking. Try to create edges at all those places where materials change e.g.Merge (Alt+M) and Remove Doubles are your tools to eliminate unnecessary vertices, use the limit value when removing doubles from selections.Bear in mind that X mirror setting does not affect extruding, deleting, etc. Either use the mirror modifier or delete, duplicate and mirror the “better” half of the mesh and use X mirror setting in edit mode. The following guidelines might be useful even if you decide to take the retopo way. I started with about 700 vertices because mobile platforms require less than 1500 triangles. I chose: Decimating with Decimate Modifier Low-Poly Character over a High-Poly model or A quick guide to using Blenders Retopo(logy) tool). Maybe after all I would prefer the first method next time (s. Which one is better depends on the demands and and last not least on your modeling skills. There is a video tutorial (12 min) at : Decimating Sculpts with MeshLab But it seems definitely a better starting point than the decimate modifier. I didn’t try this out because I didn’t know about it. One of the readers left a comment pointing to an open source tool called MeshLab.Now start adjusting the somewhat damaged low poly model. Play around with the decimate ratio and apply it when the number of vertices and faces seems to be fine for you. Then add the Decimate modifier to your low poly candidate on layer 1. Again put your high poly on layer 2, make a copy and put it on layer 1.This way you do a complete remodeling based on a perfect template. Then start on layer 1 from the scratch while both layers are visible. Put the high poly on layer 2, lock it in outliner view to be not selectable. But it was not ported for 2.5 and a deeper look into it told me that I am not the one able to do the job – what a pity.Īfter doing some more research I found out that there are mainly two ways to go: How can we do this in Blender 2.5x/2.6x? Mesh Manipulation Strategiesīack in Blender 2.4x there was a python script called mesh_poly_reduce.py by Campbell Barton that did the job not too bad and was highly respected in forum posts. OK you have got a high polygon Blender model with let’s say 10-20k vertices, maybe bought from one of the 3D model shops out there, and now this needs to be decimated because processing of animations takes ages in our game.

Meshlab decimation