Addons for mesh cleanup

Currently trying to find the best addon that can assist with some mesh cleanup for exporting to a game engine.

I attempted to use MeshLint, but it doesn’t appear to work anymore.

Basically I need to:

  • Identify tris and ngons,
  • Attempt to do a dissolve that doesn’t destroy quads
  • Fix Holes
  • Find Interior faces/non-manifold/loose/doubles
  • Find Possible faces that are “z-fighting”/overlapping.

Anybody have any ideas about the best way to go about this?

if you cant see it on the model, its not important. just eyeball it, this is not 2002, we dont need everything to be THAT optimal.

only thing i can suggest is if you have a mirror modifier, is to go through and dissolve edges along the middle throughout the model.
identifying tris and ngons is irrelevant.
fixing holes is not nessasary
interior faces can be found by going inside the model, if you say “there is too much there” then get rid of it… only have what you see in the end.
overlapping faces dont cause any harm as long as they are not on the surface. and if they are, they can be easily found in object mode with a matcap on the model.

Unfortunately, this is 2017, and the game I am developing is for VR (Vive), and is “realistic”/high poly, so have to conserve at every possible place. Since it is VR, my models will already need to be more poly-heavy since I can’t easily normal map fake it for anything the user is looking at closely.

As for n-gons and tris, I find that can create some issues with texturing and animation, so I at least want to see them. I realize it is only a few clicks in the editor, just wanted some nice tools all in one addon.

I know how to find interior faces manually, I can also find it in the select menu… again, just looking for an addon with everything in one place.

Hmm, any way to automatically select overlapping faces?

Okay, was hoping there was a way I could do a limited dissolve but maintain quads… maybe that is something that can be done inside python.

Blender has an option for converting triangles to quads which is useful since most imported models will consist of tris.

Can’t help much with Ngons and internal geometry unfortunately. I think the best you could do is to optimize your workflow so they don’t become a problem later down the line.

we got 2 tools in Bl to help with that

1 in edit mode in N panel you got analyze mesh
see wiki on this tools

2 Got the printer analyse script
that can help with a lot of things like that

but there is nothing better then doing a nice topo in first place then no problems afterward !

happy bl

I haven’t heard of anything other than what was mentioned by yourself and others. The single best thing you can do is take care while modeling. Knock potential problems down as they arise. Ngons are fairly easy to spot as are faces z-fighting. Internal stuff is a bit trickier unless you’re using a sub surf modifier. Then it becomes very apparent where they are.

But most if not all the issues you mentioned can be avoided in the first place. All you need is some experience. :slight_smile:

There is an add-on called “mesh lint” that is extremely good for that. It doesn’t fix things like that but it allows you to easily find them so you can fix them. I’m on mobile right now so I can’t easily dig up a link but it should be easy to find on Google