anyone know of any free tools for poly reduction?

most modelling programs have them built in,not sure if theres a standalone for this sort of thing.

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like stonmason said, most have them built in but you could also try using UV mapper to weld your model more and it will help reduce more of your verticies. Sharen

Attached Link: http://www.vizup.com/

Free, only one I know of, Vizup. It looks very good from the iamges on the site. The major limitation is that I think it only works with vmrl files so you'd have to convert->reduce->convert for anything else. Worth a look anyway. Here's one for $50 which from the pics, doesn't look as good as the free one. http://www.action3d.net/product.htm Here is a 7 day demo of another one which looks good - sells for $109 And of course, here's one for $4,950 in case you win the lottery. http://www.taylortrade.com/sim/rr.htm The Vizup models really do look quite nice - altered my opinion of vrml as being stricyly lo-rez. I'm not sure how well an obj or 3ds file would survive the roundtrip though. Your best bet is probably trying to find a function in your modeling program or get one of the free modelers that can do it.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

cool thanks 4,950 let me find my change jar

only does vrmls huh

Attached Link: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/software/qslim.html

Try QSim at the link above. IIRC it works on Wavefront .obj files, but strips away all the material and grouping info. Apart from that it works pretty well. Bill

BTW I had to download the source files of QSlim as well as the Win32 executable package to get the text file that described the command line options. Bill

I have used QSlim for several projects, and aside from the fact that I have to re-UV-map them afterwards, have been very happy with the results. I have obtained some very impressive compression ratios. BTW, QSlim is a command-line utility, so if you're used to GUI's, you'll have to adapt a little, but it's not so hard once you get used to it. Lynn Grant Castle Development Group

Good deal, another free tool.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

One tip: You can get different degrees of compression on different parts by using UV Mapper Pro to chop the geometry into pieces and save out the pieces as separate OBJ files. Then you compress each piece the appropriate amount. Then you merge them back together with something like Deep Exploration, or even Poser itself, then save out the new, combined geometry. (If you use Poser to merge them, you may have to tweek the resultant OBJ file to put the group names back.) This way you can simplify the body, without losing all the details of the face. One other tip, since I mentioned Deep Exploration. Any time you modify or merge models in Deep Exploration, it's a good idea to bring them back into UV Mapper and immediately save them. Something about the format (columns, number of decimal places, something) that comes out of Deep Exploration sometimes confuses Poser.

lmckenzie said: "altered my opinion of vrml as being stricyly lo-rez" I have occasionally done conversions of other formats through VRML, when that was the only common format. (For example, one conversion program converts from X to VRML, but not to Y, the other converts from VRML but not X to Y.) It is acutally a very robust file format. In many ways, it is much more versatile than the Alias/Wavefront OBJ format, because it allows you to define something one place, and then use it in several different places with various transformations and rotations, without having to redefine the geometry each time. The reason if has the reputation for low-res is because of the browsers. Since you can move through the VRML scene in real time, and the browser has to re-render the scene each time you move, anything with any degree of res completely bogs down the browser. Life would be a lot easier for us, I believe, if VRML were the standard transport file format instead of OBJ. (Actually, some would argue that 3DS is the standard transport format, I suppose, but that's really hard to work with, since it's binary.)

Quite true. Most of the vrml models I had seen were intended for real-time rendering over the web and thus, of necessity were low resolution. I've used it occasionally with a little modeler, Simply 3d, which imports obj format and actually has better mapping facilities than Poser 4. The only common output formats are vrml and maybe dxf which wasn't good for textures so I used vrml and converted. There's a new format that some of the high-end 3D companies are trying to push as a standard - don't remember the name of it. Obj and 3DS do seem to be the most prevalent and supported, followed perhaps by lwo. For the CAD folks of course, dxf or some variant probably rules. A few companies like Viewpoint have their own web 3d solutions and I haven't heard a lot about vrml lately.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

Dang. Just tried VizUP demo (exported Poser5 Woman from Poser 5 as VRML). Looked EXACTLY like what I needed. Fantastic interface: does the analysis ONCE, then can INSTANTLY switch between reductions by 10%, 20%, ... 90% at the push of a button. Reduction by 75% (to 25%; 44K polys => 11K polys) looked like just what I needed for animation performance in Poser. I REALLY like it that the vertices aren't MOVED, so that texture maps still work well - expect that there are INHERENTLY problems at texture seams when using any poly-reducer - and that would be true here as well. Just one FATAL FLAW: VizUP doesn't realize the body parts should stay welded together. So it creates polys that DON'T LINE UP between hip-abdomen-chest etc. WORKAROUND: Import OBJ P5NudeWoman geometry, Export VRML to VisUP. Now it CAN reduce - but no longer knows about the body parts, so they would have to be re-cut (in UVMapper or elsewhere). For me, not currently worth the $300 VisUP now costs.