I’m new to Blender and I’ve to say I’m very glad about the new GUI in 2.5x. I’ve seen some people working with other programs (like C4D) and know a bit of modeling. So I’m feeling a bit like home in Blender with the new GUI and so I’m after some days of playing around able to go deeper in this stuff.
Now to the problem:
I’ve got a model which was created with C4D and after some trial & error I got it importet as obj. The model was created with hypernurbs and it got many vertices… too many… over 50k. I want to animate it and to make it as easy as possible I would like to reduce the mesh. I found the decimate-modifier, but it tells me the mesh is non-manifold. I searched this term and found good tips and explanations for that, but found no solution.
Because of the extremely high detail level of the model I can’t search myself for the parts which are causing this. In my opinion there can’t be edges which belong to more than 2 Faces because the modle doesn’t have inner faces and alle parts are completely spherical. I tried also in the edit-mode to select all non-manifold (shift + ctrl + alt + m) which results in nothing selected. I looked also for a script and found this:
I can’t install this… I try to install it over the Add-Ons dialogue but it won’t get listet and I can’t activate it (Also in the menus are no changes).
So does anyone has an idea how I can resolve the non-manifold problem (or to get this script installed so I can try it)?
First, IMO, importing from another 3d application is sketchy at best. Some meshes I’ve imported worked fine, some were totally useless. I imported a .3ds file once, and the poly count was so high it slowed blender down. I tried a couple of decimation tools, and by the time they got the poly count down to reasonable level, all the fine details to the mesh was gone.
I was using a .3ds human figure, after the decimation tools were done, the finger nails were missing and the hands in bad shape, but the arms were still good looking. The point is that fingers and hands need to be higher poly than say arms, which need less detail. I think decimation tools work by merging the closest vertices. Well, that doesn’t help when you want very detailed hands and less details on the arm as these tools deal will the entire mesh and not just specific parts of it.
As to non-manifold objects, the .3ds mesh I imported came into blender as 9 objects. So I had to join all 9 objects together to get 1 single complete mesh.
Honestly I think your best bet, but I haven’t seen your file yet, is to use it as a base mesh and re-topo a low-poly mesh over it. You could reduce the poly count by 1/4 or more over the original and if you are going to uv-map it, you could bake a normal map to capture all the fine details missed in the re-topo process…
Thanks for your hint with the 2.4 script, it worked fine und I got the model down to about 3k vertices from over 55k and still looking good. With less vertices it is still good but some areas are starting to look bad… but for my purposes these results are fine. However… with the poly-reducer script I got rid of the non-manifold parts and can now tweak the model a bit with the decimate-modifier.
I think I got your point and I would mostly agree. The thing with this model is what I meant with “it is spherical”. It consist just of parts which are like spheres or tubes and it is at every point round. Also the model has no high-detail sections like fingers, just the round endings of the parts where modeled with many vertices (I think that was thorugh the hypernurb stuff which was done in C4D). I thought to remodel round things low poly would be more work than just let automatically reduce the mesh, especially when automatic reduction should do less mistakes than with a model which has outer edges (I mean “edges”, not “mesh edges” ;)) and very detailed parts like fingers. I hope I could explain it a bit understandable
Just to draw a little picture for the mind: Imagine a melon with cucumber as arms & legs… that’s what my model is like. I think no one will ever need something like this modelled with 55k vertices/faces