Attached is the control arms for the suspension of a vehicle after being imported from an OBJ. I have already applied the tris-to-quad command and the topology remained an absolute mess. The ultimate goal is to retopologize the parts and create an all quad mesh (or least amount of triangles).
However, the vehicle I am currently working on (M1025) is composed of 465,500 facets.
My initial attempts:
The remesh modifier - does not seem to work well here
Limited Dissolve into hand retopology (specifically knife tool) - This is the approach I previously used. While it reduces the complexity to a manageable amount, it also adds a major problem. For example, it is hard to visualize / add edge loops between smaller parts and larger parts.
Bsurfaces - A recent approach I have tested after some forum browsing
The object has unapplied and negative scale. (Object mode), ctrl+A -> scale to apply. The normals flip because the scale was negative. Edit mode, select all, W -> remove doubles. Ctrl+N to make normals consistent and pointing outside. The object also carries custom split normals data which no longer applies because double geometry was removed, you can clear those in object data properties shown in the screenshot.
If you want, could lower the autosmooth angle value to have sharp edges again
Got it to more manageable 1496 triangles with decimate modifier: planar, mesh selection tools, mesh menu -> clean up, X -> limited dissolve, and by using intersecting geometry. Too many steps to do a writeup though ControlArms_ja12.blend (1.14 MB)
Thank you for pointing out the scaling issue and the split normals, I did not realize that.
However, while I am able to reduce the complexity as you did, the bigger issue I have is re-meshing the model to quads. What do you think would be the best approach?
