Retopology on very detailed hair

[CMeurin]

A buddy of mine shared some of his leisure-time projects some time ago and I recently started really getting into low poly game character modeling. The problem is this character’s hair-do is attrociously detailed and I was wondering if there’s a way to retopo this easier or if I’m in for a nastily tedious several hours?

Here’s a screenshot of the object and edit modes for the hair mesh that I took. I fear that posting this on P3D may put tremendous stress on someone’s GPU if viewed. I do recall a .blend file paste site, but not only do I not recall what it was, but importing my friend’s .OBJ file into Blender and saving it resulted in a whopping 67 megabyte file.

[Sanctuary]

You can try the decimate modifier.
If those hairs are all quads, give a try to the “Un-Subdivide” setting of the modifier, increase the iteration value and see if you can get some good result.

[CMeurin]

I understand. However, I was wondering if there’s a simpler way to retopo this as opposed to spending hours doing the strands one by one. Not to mention how I’ll even mark seams…

[DerekWatts]

There’s no such thing as a “retopo button” so there will always be work involved. You can try Sanctuary’s suggestion or you can try just deleting the edge loops (X > G). That may be the easiest, but if you want to get a bit more into it, you could try something like this:

[CMeurin]

Hmm… I guess I could try that. Thanks