Reduces the number of polygons in a model while attempting to preserve its shape as much as possible.
It is an easy way to clean-up geometry while maintaining its quality and making it faster to render.
Using PolyReduce
Select the object whose polygons you want to reduce.
Click the
PolyReduce tool on the Polygon tab.
Select the crease edges, if any, and press Enter when finished.
Reduce the polygons by a percentage of the initial amount, number of polygons, or according to distance from a camera in the parameter editor.
Note
This tool requires a triangular mesh, which may increase the initial polygon count.
For specific parameter help see the PolyReduce node help.
Using PolyReduce on flat surfaces
Using polyreduce on a flat surface tends to result in equal sized polys when Equalize Edges is turned on. Even if you use the weight attribute to create a grading of sizes, it seems not to work. However, it is because the error of any reduction is computed to be 0. Since the surface is perfectly flat, edge collapses are “perfect”.
You can get around this by adding a small amount of random noise to the flat direction. For example an XY grid can be altered with rand($PT)*0.1 in $TZ. The resulting mesh will have a cost for all collapses, so the Attribute Weight will let you grade the mesh as expected.