How to reduce unneeded verticies on polygon hair?

I kind of ran into a small problem with my model’s hair. I finished modelling it, as you can see:


However, there are a lot of vertices that can’t be seen, and won’t be needed:


Is there any quick and easy way to either get rid of these, or combine them together and still have the top part look good? Thanks a bunch :slight_smile:

Here’s the file if you need it: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/42569

Quick and easy?.. Maybe… What I would recommend is going the inverse approach of deleting the unseen stuff by selecting the stuff you see first and then inverting your selection and hitting delete. I think circle select on face mode will be your friend here. You will want to have the hair all as it own mesh… Which I see you do…

One thing I would recommend with your model though is to treat your current hair as the… Base mesh for retopology. You have a TON of clipping and simply deleting the hidden bits of your current mesh doesn’t make it as clean as it could be. If you’re less hip to the term retopology then what that is is basically modeling a cleaner simpler mesh with another mesh as a guide… So in other words you are going to want to make a new object plane and label it something like “better hair model” and then turn on the snap tools in edit mode and model a new mesh over your old mesh… Once you are done I’d recommend selecting the edges of you hair strands and assigning them as hard edges and then use the edge split modifier and then setting the shading to smooth.

A couple of vids on retopology and hard edges:

Yes, use a circle select mode in blender. Press C while in edit mode to activate it.