I have this gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that theres something very vital I’ve forgotten to do, but I dont have any idea.
Basically, I need to apply the PLANAR decimation to this object (with the default values), but after a while it just hangs blender and I have to close the program. I suspect the answer is really simple, but the only thing I could think of is removing double vertices and that did not work.
You could separate the faces by normal, so you end having 6 different lighter objects. The top cover will still hang blender unless you reduce it a bit first using decimate in un-subdivide mode. Either way, the topology for the cover has holes, and doesn’t lend itself very well to planar decimation (un-sub works wonders, though).
By the way, you know all this decimation will wreck your UVs, right?