I’m working with Blender for some time now, mainly on game projects. I’ve encountered a small problem while modelling LoDs. As far as I know it’s impossible to preserve UV coordinates when merging vertices and moving edges. There is an option in 3D MAX that you can slide edge loops / merge geometry and the UV map will be preserved. Of course it works to a certain level od deformation / merging but helps a lot and is a huge time saver.
Does anybody have a solution for that in Blender? Say you have a highres / midres model from Zbrush with decent topology, but you want to create lower LoDs for that with Blender. The model has is UV unwrapped and fully textured with several texture maps. What would you do?
For now the only option I am aware of is to pin every vertex that is a part of a seam and unwrap the mesh again after changing topology. But that works only if you have quite a lot of UV islands.