I posted this over at the blender forums but I'm asking here too since the prop will ultimatly be a studio/poser prop for free if it works and the answer may take someone familair with those apps whereas the blender crew doesn't venture too far out of blender for the most part.

Ok, so I made this sole using a bezier curve in 2D, then extruded the live curve, added a slight bevel and converted it to a mesh but doing so it makes these crazy-ass faces.
What tool would a noob go about using to clean this up so it does not render like crap, because it renders like crap and I'm exporting this out to OBJ and rendering in something like poser or daz studio as the native obj file

thanks!

looks to me like you have modeled the holes for the "thong" bit ? you dont need them(unless your doing an extreme  close up of theflip flop) and mesh will be a lot cleaner without them

one major issues you will have is the use of long,thin triangles

poser hates them and distorts them badly

hedheld is correct that they dont need to be so detailed as to include the holes because unless you intend for photoreal renders they will never be seen

the triangles kill in poser and id guess in studio as well since i do not use the program

retrace the steps with palnar modeling and you should be fine

A manual cleanup is really the only way if you want to keep the detail.

Alternatively, you can make the sole a seperate object and use the shrinkwrap modifier to fit to shape. Add a cube and make sure it is a little larger than the sole and has enough subdivisions to get the detail then add the modifer to the cube. The cube mesh will shrink to fit.

Hope that helps.

doing a closeup, photoreal, holes required, otherwise I'd use someone elses model.

@touchwood, never used shrinkwrap, I'm still noobing with blender on and off my not retaining everything I learn until I do it like 50 x.

ok, I went a tried shrinkwrap, it's picking up some bad geometry from the holes I cut and I noticed so I may start over with that part.

well if you must have the holes the best I can sugest is keep the outside curve, make the holes and build the faces out from the holes to join with curve, it will be boring but you will get a clean mesh

have fun

ps I wanna see the pic lol (if I can) cant think of a pic where the flipflop is the important bit ;-)

if you still need help post a link to the mesh and i can walk you through the fastest fix for what it is at origin

basicly delete loops but you need to keep some common points

the edges look to be ok from the posted image but without seeing the real mesh its a crapshoot

you could duplicate it SHIFT+D and in editmode change tris to quads , remove doubles. and smooth manualy but i do not know the mesh

the holes have waaaayyyyy too many loopcuts to be effective

im not knocking the modeling but for studio and poser its too heavy, theres too much to render

poser hates long thin anythings, and even now with blender working correctly in non-gnoms it even worse

I went in over my head, and I posted a freebie but the poly count was insane. I went back to the drawing board and did it all in box modeling and kept my poly count down and should have something by morning, though not a flop flop.

thanks for the help everyone.

i tend to do everything in mass scale and mass poly counts so dont freak on it

make what you make and if people like it they are happy and if they dont    who cares?

anyhow heres my idea of how to keep poly count down ;-) maybe give you some ideas for the future, has 538 polys at the mo' so 1 subD would push it to a couple of thou then the strap would push it to about 5,000 but with some practise I could maybe get it a bit lower

(yes I know its not quite right shape but I just wanted to see the best way to make it )

The method to my madness is

Sole:

box

sub devide box about 5 or 6 times

model the rough shape of the sole

subsurf to 1

smooth shading.

Straps:

all the above and then apply to a curve, which I'm still painstakingly learning

array a fixed number, curve modifier.

export to Daz Studio 4, see all the normals that I hosed, go back into Blender and try and fix.

Modeling with the curve did not work when it came to the surfaces, but it was great for getting the shape in fewer clicks.  I don't know what happened with the first set of polys but the sandals were tanking my Dual Xeon 2.4 with 8GB RAM at work. Granted it's a Mac, on further inspection I saw I had layers of invisible polgyons hidden under other objects. SO DO I JUST CUT THESE OUT AND LEAVE THEM OR DO I CUT THEM OUT AND CLOSE THE FACES EVEN IF THEY'RE NOT GOING TO BE SEEN?

these should hit rendo today, either the fixed version or the ones that have more polys than a pixar character.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/68486/view/5/3D-Model/V4-Star-Sandals-OBJ-File

the next batch are still being worked out, almost ready for frebies. I just wish I didn't wait so long to go back and try to learn Blender.

I downloaded your model from sharecg.  A couple of things stand out.  You can reduce the polycount of your model by more than half by reducing the edge loops of the strap stitching alone.  You have 48 stitches each made up of three braided strands.  If you delete just half of the edge loops of each stitch you will go from around 81,000 faces to around 39,000 faces.  The largest, most visible areas of your model should have the mose detail and the smallest least visible parts should have the lowest detail.  With this in mind the sole parts of your flip flop could have a subdivion modifier applied and the stitching detail reduced as mentioned above would give better balance to your model.  Also look closely at your model and look for areas that will not be seen and delete those extra faces.  For example the top foot support part of your flip flop has an underside that is inside of the model that can't be seen so this can be removed, and the main sole has a topside that is covered by the foot support.  Parts of the stitching that are inside of the strap can be deleted.

When you used the array modifier to create your strap you have ended up with each of the stap "panels" overlapping indicating that you may have used an incorrect offset.  If you modeled your origin strap panel symetrically then using the relative offset set at one should give you a clean array.

Lastly before you export to .obj apply all your modifiers and use the "remove doubles" function to remove duplicate vertices.

thanks Keppel, I'm still working out how arrays work and still not comforable with them. I thought I had removed doubles but I'm still working out the kinks as and could have probably done the stitching with a displacment map but that means I have to learn how to UV map with Blender. So much to learn.

With your array if your offset is correct then each of the array duplicates will be exactly adjacent to the next which means that you will have overlapping vertices.  When you apply the array modifier then remove doubles you are "welding" those overlapping vertices together.  With your mesh, the duplicates are not overlapping with a small enough threshold so removing doubles will not actually achieve anything.

There is nothing wrong with modelling the stitching just keep the level of detail at the lowest level whilst still achieving the look that you want. 

So remove doubles before applying the modiifer?

No, remove doubles after applying the modifier.  Consider removing doubles as a clean up exercise after the model is done.