While I’m not technically “new” to blender in the traditional sense of the word, as I’ve used blender for years, I’m very much inexperienced with blender. In this case, I needed to simplify the geometry of a mesh I had made in an external program that had semi-high poly of just over 56k tris. After struggling a bit to get decent results with merge by distance (which is what I normally use) and other simplification techniques I would normally use, due to my mesh having geometry that is rather close together at times, I did a little research and found the concept of retopology, which definitely matched my use case.
As my mesh doesn’t have any crucial geometry that folds in on itself, I determined a simple remesh modifier would do a decent job. I initially tried quad remesh, but it refused to work (gave some error about inconsistent manifolds and normals), and since I don’t have the experience to deal with that, I just tried the voxel remesh, which did work.
After setting the voxel size to 0.005, I got an acceptable level of detail from the model, and I went into the modeling tab to confirm the geometry had been simplified. To my horror, while having an absolutely immaculate topology, it also consisted of some 15+ million triangles, and I have no idea how to deal with that. As I type this, blender is frozen in the background trying to crunch through a limited dissolve.
As a final note, I am running a 32 core processor with a 4090, so I do have some performance room in terms of what I can do to simplify this mesh; however clearly my methods with 15+ million triangles is still just a bit too much for my computer.
In addition, voxel remesh didn’t provide any satisfactory results below .005. Perhaps quad remesh would, but I have no clue how to make it work.
I have the base mesh saved, so I can reimport it easily.
I’m just not quite sure what to do, as the voxel remesh at that density is the only level that gives good quality for my mesh, and quad remesh isnt working.
I had a big nasty project with object after object to clean up. Figured out how many hours I’d spent that day on retopo + Instant Meshes GitHub - wjakob/instant-meshes: Interactive field-aligned mesh generator and did the math of hours * minimum wage. Decided to get it and quad remesher was amazing.
However, while looking stuff up for this post I saw this new update–a free autoremesher that does a side-by-side with quad remesher
Quad Remesher is better than Autoremesher. Autoremesher works only on certain types of meshes and has a tendency to create six-sided singularities (badly subdividing edge infarcts). It’s not fine-tuned yet, and has been abandoned for a few years now.
