Redundant polygon cleanup tool recommendations?

Hi, I'm looking for a tool (or tool chain) which can automatically clean up the redundant polygons generated by Maplet and other CSG modellers.

Basically, I need something that can reduce the number of polygons used in a mesh (assuming the mesh geometry uses more polygons than are actually required) without altering the shape of the mesh.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Export to MAP and use BSP Modelers (QUARK, Hammer, GTK) that allow you to import map

Alternatives: No, hidden surface removal is not possible for free geometry at least not in a regular human lifetime. Progressive mesh reduction can be done through the mesh reducer you can buy at www.thegamecreators.com for example.

And "without altering the shape of the mesh" you won't get anything, at least unless the model was done badly upfront with lots of unneeded geometry. (for normal maps etc you don't need real geometry, subdivision modifiers do it as well)

As I said, Dreamora. this for models generated by Maplet. CSG modellers tend to generate fairly fractured geometry (picture a quad made up of three or more polygons when it only needs two, for example).

Basically what you are looking for is an LOD tool

This deals with redundant polys:
http://www.okino.com/conv/polygon_reduction/geoman2/polygon_reduction_tutorial2.htm

You don't need an LOD tool or polygon reduction. What you need is less CSG. You'll never manage a clean mesh with something that builds geometry through a boolean operation like CSG does, unless you know exactly how the program likes to cut things up and manage to manipulate it to do exactly what you want. The chances of that are slim. Polygon reduction might leave you with less polygons, but you'll still have a messy mesh, and that can cause issues, depending on what it is you're doing. Whether it does or doesn't, reduction isn't designed for things like levels because it applies the entire reduction to everything all at once.

Your options are, aside from less CSGing, bringing your model into something like Silo and using a retopolgy tool on it to rebuild the mesh correctly. That'd be the best option for organic models, but for levels and the like, you'd be better of building (say for example in 3D World Studio) properly built pre-fab pieces and creating your level with those.

You'll save yourself many headaches.

CSG is a perfectly valid way of building level geometry. Not perfect, certainly, but you can hammer out a lot of level geometry in a short amount of time.



Hence the need for a cleanup tool.

Building the model prefabs in a polygonal modelling tool, may be a better option in the future, I agree. I need to clean up the geometry for some existing Maplet meshes, though.

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I'm not sure if a polygon reduction/LOD tool would be the best choice. I guess it depends on the algorithm used. I don't want to change the shape of the mesh in any way, just rebuild the fractured polygonal geometry so that it is less fractured.

I agree you can hammer out geometry quickly with CSG, but quickly in the modelling world usually results in issues ;) (unless you're a speed modeller, of course)

Two more options for cleaning meshes-

Hexagon 2 at Daz3D. It's a buggy fairly feature limited program, but the polygon reducer does work well, and it's dirt cheap. Also, you could bring your mesh into a modeller which supports quadrangulation. It won't fix bad geometry, but it might help to cut back on tris so you can fix things easier by hand.

I think clean up tools are pretty messy themselves. Unfortunetly, the best way is by hand :o( But if it's only a few polies here and there, the best option is to leave them, it's not going to slow things down.

Thanks for all replies.

I was hoping someone had found a solution to the problem of cleaning up the geometry of Maplet models, but unfortunately it seems not to be the case. I'll probably just release the Maplet models as is, at a reduced price, and try to progressively improve the quality of my future modelling efforts. The models are probably not good enough for commercial projects, but some people might find them useful for test arenas and freeware projects.

I've just been using Decorator to do the texturing on one of these Maplet models and the fragmentation is truly godawful. It's not really apparent when doing a walkthrough of the arena models though, even with my crappy video card. The polycount is just a lot higher than it could be.

Can we have a look at one? If I can see the kind of 'damage done' I might be able to think up something...