Blender help

[Cainnech McClernon]

Hi all

Need some help, am looking at making a custom helmet using a wolf shaped helmet that I got from thingiverse based on the war-hammer space marines. I have tried YouTube videos which have helped a bit but cant get the amount of detail to reduced down so that pepakura can handle it, I have tried loading a half helm to try and trace around it but am struggling with the manipulation of the plane part and feel really lost and overwhelmed.

The attached pics is the helmet that I am trying to make and the stl/obj file just has to much faces/vertices/vectors, not sure which one and that is what am trying to reduce down, I have tried to un-subdivide as well as a remesh with no success

Any help or tips would be great
(am running on blender 4.2, but also have some experience working with mesh-mixer as well)

 

[PlanetAlexander]

Usually the method that people use to get the polygon count down is called "Decimation". What this does is merges vertices (see the below diagram), the amount is based by the ratio set in the modifier. In Blender there is two ways to do this: the first is as a modifier, which is non-destructive as it allows you to control the level of decimation until you apply it; the other method, found in Edit Mode under Mesh > Clean Up > Decimate Geometry, applies it straight away.

However... looking at your photo attachments, there's some quite soft edges on the model, which would make creating seam lines in Pepakura very difficult. I'd recommend skipping the decimation and looking into hand Remeshing this model. It might seem like a painful process straight up, but I'm almost certain it'll save you time when you get 'round to unfolding it!

 

[Cainnech McClernon]

Usually the method that people use to get the polygon count down is called "Decimation". What this does is merges vertices (see the below diagram), the amount is based by the ratio set in the modifier. In Blender there is two ways to do this: the first is as a modifier, which is non-destructive as it allows you to control the level of decimation until you apply it; the other method, found in Edit Mode under Mesh > Clean Up > Decimate Geometry, applies it straight away.

View attachment 351702

However... looking at your photo attachments, there's some quite soft edges on the model, which would make creating seam lines in Pepakura very difficult. I'd recommend skipping the decimation and looking into hand Remeshing this model. It might seem like a painful process straight up, but I'm almost certain it'll save you time when you get 'round to unfolding it!

OK thank you, and yes its very heavy, so far though experimenting I have found that a remesh on the voxel seemed to reduce it down as the decimation didn't seem to do anything unless it was and there were so many vertices to notice a difference but am slowly getting there. I did see a video with someone tracing the item as well but I was struggling with getting it to work, they where using planes to get it and snapping to face but didn't show how they were changing and adding new parts

 

[Cainnech McClernon]

Usually the method that people use to get the polygon count down is called "Decimation". What this does is merges vertices (see the below diagram), the amount is based by the ratio set in the modifier. In Blender there is two ways to do this: the first is as a modifier, which is non-destructive as it allows you to control the level of decimation until you apply it; the other method, found in Edit Mode under Mesh > Clean Up > Decimate Geometry, applies it straight away.

View attachment 351702

However... looking at your photo attachments, there's some quite soft edges on the model, which would make creating seam lines in Pepakura very difficult. I'd recommend skipping the decimation and looking into hand Remeshing this model. It might seem like a painful process straight up, but I'm almost certain it'll save you time when you get 'round to unfolding it!

I would like to say a big thank you for your help, I know its not perfect and I still have a lot to learn with blender and pepakura etc, but as you can see in the picture I got pretty much what I was after

 

[PlanetAlexander]

Glad to see you're getting somewhere!

I don't often use Blender's in-built remesher, though I am experimenting with it being part of my sculpting workflow. Regarding the manual remeshing, I think by "adding new parts" you might be referring to extruding, which takes the selected vertex/edge/face and creates new geometry from that. If you're interested in learning some of the basics of Blender, there's a lot of great tutorials out there - been a long time since I've seen beginner videos, but I know Blender Guru is still a good source!