How to "merge" poly's?

Is there a way to “merge” two (or more) poly’s in “Edit” mode? I want to basically take 4, flat, square shaped, quads and merge them into one. I’m trying to manually clean up and reduce a high res mesh (about 10,000 polys). I know this is possible with Wings, but the export/import process turns my quads into tri’s, and I don’t want that. I tried the “pyRedux” poly reduction script, but I want more control than that.

How can I do this in Blender?

And merging vertices doesn’t do the trick for you?
P

That’s one of two ways I’m doing it now: One way is to select some “middle” vertices and “merge” on “center”. The other way is to delete a number of quads and then pick the outside four vertices and create a new quad.

Either way I do it, it’s very time consuming and requires a number of keystrokes or menu selects. I was hoping there might be an easier / faster way.

Check out this link . . . may be just what you need.

I know there was a tool for this job in the previous releases of Blender.
I just can’t remember the name of it and I can’t find it in the 2.41 version. I’ll try to remember the name and look for it and if I find it I’ll tell you!

I’ve just remembered. The tool was called “Mesh Decimator” and it was in the buttons window /editing panel but as i said it’s not in there in the 2.41 version. :frowning:
If you find it please note me

Yes, that does look very promissing. The illustrations show merging tri’s, I wonder what the function will do to quads?

In the mean time, I’m about ready to give up hope… argh… It’s just too slow to try and clean up this model and pyRedux really messes up the mesh. It may be faster to just remodel the ship by hand…

Could you export your model to Wings, reduce the poly count then do the following to convert back to quads:

  1. Enter Editmode
  2. Select all the verticies.
  3. Press Alt+J (To convert the Triangles to Quads).

This should give you the wanted reduction in polys while resulting in quads.

I hope this helps.

In 2.4x, Decimate is a modifier.

But this too will most likely ‘ugly’ up the mesh. It’s most useful for simplifying terrain meshes, where a random face topology is usually not a problem.

bigkahuna:

I’m not sure exactly how the patched Merge functions will treat quads. I played with it a little while ago, but can’t remember all the results of my tests. :-?

It’s worth a try to check on your current project, no?

“Decimate” is now in the “Modifier” panel. Doesn’t work for this because my model is a “non-manifold mesh”… whatever that means…

EDIT: Oops, sorry, you found it already. We must be posting on top of each other…

The problem with exporting to Wings then using “tris to quads” in Blender is that my quads are no longer square after running the script. The script makes the tri’s into “paralellograms”, which messes up some of my uv’s and smoothing.

The best solution so far (haven’t gotten it to work 100% yet) is this:

  1. Import the mesh into Carrara Pro and save as a VRML 2.0 file (Blender exports VRML 1.0 only)

  2. Bring the mesh into “VIZup”, a free mesh reduction tool I found some months ago. It takes VRML 2.0 files only but does a very nice job.

  3. Take the reduced mesh back into Carrara Pro, convert to a .OBJ then bring it into Blender.

You are probably asking why I am using Carrara Pro plus Blender together. I started with Carrara several years ago, but am now developing a ship’s sim using Blender Game Engine. If Blender exported VRML 2.0, I wouldn’t need Carrara for this.

Thank you! :slight_smile:

why hasnt shift+s been mentioned? Is that what you mean? Select 2 poly’s and press shift+s and join the selection at the center. Then go the panel that has extrude, subdivision, etc(i’m still noob :smiley: and somewhat tired) and click remove doubles.

Thanks for trying :wink: but no, that’s not what I meant. SHIFT-S “selection-center” collapses the selected faces to a single point. I want to keep the geometric shape and just merge faces where possible. For example: if four square-shaped poly’s were merged into a single, larger square-shaped poly. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Have you tried deleting edgeloops only? You select an edgeloop by alt+rightclick on an edge. To remove it without deleting faces, press X and then 7 (or select “Edge Loop” from the pupmenu).

This will however not update the UV map, leaving holes. If you want to preserve your UV maps, try this old script (needs more than two vertices in an edge loop).

In Blender 2.42 I think it will be possible to keep the UV mapping by pressing the control key while merging vertices.

Wow, that is just too easy! Thanks!

This will however not update the UV map, leaving holes. If you want to preserve your UV maps, try this old script (needs more than two vertices in an edge loop).

Very, very useful! Thanks!