Hi All
Smart Decimate
Today I have a very beautiful wake up, I saw the snow for the first time in my life!!!!! (movies and pictures does not count 
) I’m sure many of you are actually bored of it but for a newcomer this is something exiting, seen fluffy white things falling from sky in curling like the gray rain drops will never do is awesome! 
And don’t blame me, sometimes working in any task I feel deep in my brain a cooking idea onto something related but different at the same time, I’m the “divergent thinking” type
As a result , I was working yesterday in some twisted bug fixing tasks and after solving them faster that I was estimated I said to myself the mother of all divergent questions: -”what if ….?”
So today I’m very pleased to announce the Decimate command for Surface mode. (Adaptive or Smart Decimate)
While 3DC has lot’s of powerful re-sampling tools most of them are for the voxel mode, so the result of a global re-sample is typically marching cubes like so is not an option after you spend so much time sculpting that detailed model with surface tools. There’s also the manual and local use of Reduce brush of course and that is always very encouraged to spend wisely your polygon budget, but ultimately, in big and complex models manually reducing is not optimal, and that’s the reason of the Decimate command, it will smartly reduce low detail areas of the model while will try to keep small full featured zones as detailed as possible, hence, optimizing your polygon count enormously and maintaining the visual appearance.
The potential use of this tool is huge, for example it can be used to pass down the reduced model onto AUTOPO or other pipeline tools so it can be processed faster while using the high res for normal baking, also, in game engines that use mostly triangular models with this new tool can be more efficient simply skipping the AUTOPO step because you will have a ready to export triangular and optimal model
Hope you like it 
Original model
After 2 iterations
After 2 iterations
After 2 iterations
After 6 iterations
After 6 iterations
After 6 iterations
After 6 iterations
After 6 iterations
After 6 iterations
Speechles as always. I can see so many situations where this feature helps a lot. Thanks for coding this…
Looks impressive, especially how well it adapts the level of reduction to where it’s needed most (leaving detail around edges etc.) This will definitely let people work on far more detailed models than their computer would otherwise handle. The lack of visual difference between your model with 1.6 milliuon polys Vs 136k is stunning! (Although I missed it at first because the numbers were too small to be readable in the scaled down version of the image). Nice work as always!
Enjoy the snow while you have it too. If you get time see if you can get out and try tabogganing / skiing / snowboarding. I’ve got a feeling you’d enjoy it!
Dang. Not sure why my name didn’t come up just as “Blendiac” above…
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Would be cool if you could paint a surface’s visibility, much like weight painting for bone influence, and have the algo tune its aggressiveness accordingly. For instance, you could flag the bottom of the neck in the model, and have it end up being only a handful of polys, since that part of the model will never be displayed to end users.
Gah, I meant “the underside of the model” not “bottom of the neck.”
There is nothing like being rapped up in extreme winter clothing, and sitting outside in the snow , early morning, watching sunrise with hot chocolate.