I made a high detail model for a game and now i need to make an lod. but when i manually delete polys and stuff, while still keeping the overall shape of the item, the uv screws up and gets all jumbled up. its probably because i get rid of some of the edges that have the uv seams on them.
i tried the dissolve feature, but that seems to only work for faces, and i need to get rid of vertices and edges too.
here are some pics of what i want:
i want these two connected cubes to become one cube, while still keeping the seams and having the square-ish shape of the uv. is there anyway to do this?
Try the decimate modifier in “unsubdivide” mode. Aside from that there’s really no way. UVs store vertex order and location. Changing either destroys how the rest are sorted. In the future your workflow should go as follows:
Model low poly
UV unwrap
Subdivide/multires
Sculpt
This way you keep a lowpoly version that you can work with later. Alternatively you could create a lowpoly object afterwards, UV unwrap it, and bake color/normal/etc. data from selected to active using the high poly to the low poly.
Just an FYI : the Decimate modifier has recently been worked on and in recent releases preserves UVs during the decimation process. It works pretty well.
Hi! I’m a bit late to the conversation but I hopefully could help anyone trying to unsuvdivide and losing the uvs. I’ve found a good answer and it’s this:
In the uv editor select all the islands and choose UV>Seams from Islands
Select in the viewport select one edge seam and then Shift+G and choose “Seam”
3.Press V to rip the edges and then right click to cancel the movement, this will separate the edges but they’ll stay in the same place
Add the decimate modifier in Unsubdivide mode, choose the desired decimation and then apply it
This will preserve the uvs intact!!! the you can weld the ripped geometry back.