Ok so I may have completely screwed myself here, but I figure I’ll at least ask for help here before I give up and start over.
So I made a fairly complicated mesh of a female human. It had a subsurface level 3 and a mirror modifier on it. Before I started trying to build an armature, I was reading up on some tutorials, and it told me I needed to apply my mirror modifier.
Being the novice/idiot that I am, I also applied my subsurface modifier. It wasnt until much later (and multiple saves) that I realized removing that modifier made my mesh about a million times more complicated and difficult to work with. It has so many verticies now that it almost crashes my computer in edit mode.
Is there any sort of scripting available that might be able to reverse my stupidity, or should I just start over from scratch?
Make sure you first search for a quit.blend file that may have your older unapplied version in your temp or tmp directory (or a .blend1 or 3688.blend type file - the numbers may be different)
If all is lost this might help:
Make a backup first. I always save versions as a higher number in case I end up with a problem I can’t correct. I’ve gone over 100 versions on some files.
You might select edge loops you want to delete, with the alt key held down. (in edit mode)
Press x for delete and select the “edge loop” menu item. You may have to repeat these steps a number of times to simplify the mesh.
There are scripts to reduce points but I think the result might be a bit too random. That’s all I can think of at the moment. Again - make a backup first!
If nothing else works, you could Alt RMB on an edge to select the edgeloop, then X key and choose delete edgloop. This way you could get rid of entire edgeloops easily. Applied subsurf usually have very orderly edgeloops.
Or he could do the 1000 times faster selecting two edgeloops, go to edge mode, unselecting both of the edge loops (must be with edge loop select otherwise it won’t work), pressing W, selecting merge and at last choosing Collapse.
Actually, none of the suggestions work out that well. Subsurf doesn’t only add vertices but also smoothes the object, obviously. Therefore you will have to decide which loops to keep and which to remove and let’s not forget, you would have to remove loops horizontally and vertically (if you get what I mean ^^; ). Look at a simple cube with a subsurf modifier of 3 applied…
That involves some hard work and a lot of time…(especially with a subsurf level of 3). I don’t want to discourage you but maybe the time is better spent with a remodeling of the mesh…with all the things you’ve learned on your old one, I’m sure this one will be even better, see it as a learning experience!
(There is also the decimator tool which can be used to reduce the vertexcount but I’m absolutely not sure if the results are useful in such a case…)
