Model in quads (blocks or squares) and stay away from triangles as much as possible. With quads you have more control to move things around and add geometry as needed without things getting messy.

Keep in mind with Artisan that the closer two parallel lines are, the less smoothing that will take place. So for example, if you subdivide and smooth the arm of your chair and it's turning out too rounded and thin, you need to add splines to reinforce the edges. If this isn't clear, do a little experiment: make a cube and subdivide and smooth it. What you will get is a ball... but if you take that same cube and looking at it in front view you run the knife tool close to each edge, instead of getting a ball you will get a rounded cube when you subdivide and smooth it. The further from the edge those splines are, the more rounded it will be.

So what you want to do is decide where you need to run splines on your chair in order to hold it's shape but still round out in the correct amount.

@mac1 said:

Sorry we will have to agree to disagree. I did some studies some time ago looking at MeshLab to address model simplification ref https://sites.google.com/site/sagesuwiki/tutorials/tips/meshlab#1+Meslab+Cleaning+and+Repairing+Filters.jpg?attredirects=0.
Unfortunately there have been reformats by others than the author and all graphics appear lost. At the time there were issues with SU / dae and now Su is nearly 100% compliant to it and results should be better since that was required to import to it.
MeshLab has a number of filters that can simplify the OP model, these are used in many other programs to form their basis of filters.
It will be up to the OP to evaluate the various recommendations included herein and select the approach he / she feels best meets the needs at hand.
The link I have shown shows some of the programs capability. If vertex tools has a simple solution why not show it so OP can compare?

I should have been a little more gracious... sorry. And actually maybe this is what he's looking for. I get stuck in this mindset that everyone wants perfectly flat planes (because that's what I'm always looking for!), so I guess it depends what kind of results he wants and whether he wants to move in-between programs.

Basic video showing Vertex Tools make planar and Cleanup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrJQ8SP-KIg%26amp;feature=youtu.be

@mac1 said:

There are programs for model decimation , but as the number of faces and vertices are reduced the model will become more and more lumpy. You as a user will have to make a decision on how much reduction is acceptable.
The Mesh Lab program has a number of different filters one can use to accomplish what you want but first you will probably have to spend some time cleaning up the 3d scanned data in terms of normal smoothing, vertex combining etc before one would attempt any type of decimation. They even have tutorials show how the David statute 3d scanned data was processed. This is not a trivial effort and it entails more than just loading a plug in and running it.
Here is a place for you to start https://www.youtube.com/user/MrPMeshLabTutorials.

I'm not sure how useful this would be for the model he's showing us here. I think using Mesh Lab would just add a step that wouldn't do him much good for this model because he's still going to have to use something like Vertex Tools make planar function even if you reduced the polygon count.

I would just stick with Vertex Tools make planar function and then run cleanup. This would be the simplest and cleanest results.

@thomthom said:

Well, when Pixar is so kind to [url\https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv]give away[/url] their [url\http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/]subdivision technology[/url] in an effort to standardize - then that's a pretty good friend to have.

The industry sort of seems to be going that direction to some degree... but then I'm sure Modo handed over a nice little bag of money to buy Pixar's love for their software.

@thomthom said:

(Btw, I'm currently not using OpenSubDiv. I found out about this not too long ago. Currently I'm using an older techniques. But it's on my list of key features I want to add.)

At this point I'm more than happy to see any SubD implementation at all, but added OpenSubDiv features would be stellar!

SubDs in SU? I don't believe it. This cannot be real. It's a hallucination brought on from a flagrant misuse of 3D modelling software... But then I remember having a similar feeling about Vertex Tools as well... or was that solid inspector? It's all so hazy.

You know thomthom, you are getting dangerously close to making SU a full fledged 3D package here, and certain big software names might get a little upset about this. Watch your back because the 3D mafia might start taking notice.

Artisan's version of make planar won't work for most of this model (but Vertex Tools version will). Artisan's make planar will only place geometry to a user specified default SU axis... XYZ only, whereas Vertex Tools works for any plane because it averages the coordinate vertices themselves and isn't hinged to the SU axis system.

I should note that even if you change the axis with the axis tool, Artisan doesn't recognize it and will still places the geometry to standard defaults. Artisan is excellent for a lot of things, but making planar is not one of them. Vertex Tools on the other hand is excellent for doing this.

@cotty said:

Vertex tools has a function to make a selection planar...

Vertex Tools "make planar"... converts any selection into a single averaged plane. Looking at your model you will probably have to do this about a dozen times or so with all the different plane areas you have going on.

After you average all your separate planes you will still want to run the cleanup plugin to erase all those extra lines.

Photoshop, or if you need something that is free GIMP works quite well.

Here's a solution that I tried out and it works relatively well.

1- Ungroup everything in your car model.
2- Make a copy of the car (if you only need two views, front and side views)
3- Viewing each copy separately in each orthographic view of front and side, use the Artisan knife tool to slice the car in half. Delete the back half of the car in the one model and a side of the car in the other (the idea here is to get rid of any pieces that when flattened into a pancake we do not want to see IE the back of the car...).
4- Use Vertex Tools or any scaling tool that allows you scale an object to absolute flat zero and flatten each instance of the car pieces to the appropriate plane.

Essentially the idea here is to crunch the car by scaling into a single plane but getting rid of the details of the opposite sides when merged together. For your side view you might be able to just scale the vehicle without cutting it in half, but you might end up extra unwanted polygons depending on how well the two sides of the car mirror each other.

Hope that made sense, I was typing on my phone and trying to give you the short version...

This can be done but you have to rebuild the brim, and the easiest way to do this would be to get rid of the broken geometry and simplify the area of where the brim used to be into a small set of surfaces and hopefully still see where the brim used to be --hence using the knife tool.

Once you have something that you can extrude out as a new brim, from there it's just a matter of pushing and pulling vertices around to get the shape back to a realistic looking brim.

Use Artisans knife tool to slice off the remaining brim and delete with as few slices as possible and as far out away from the head or top portion of the hat as the case may be. --Try to preserve the front view arc of the brim still attached to the hat-- Extrude out a new brim using Joint Push Pull. Use the knife tool again to add vertices or to trim and delete to get the proper shape. Use Vertex Tools to shape in detail as needed.

Might want to hide most of the figure at some point when slicing with the knife.

I can't use Artisan without Vertex Tools as well. Artisan by itself without the gizmo and VT's "make planar" function is only half as good.

Instead of using the follow me tool you might want to just create a cylinder with multiple vertical sections (Push Pull Tool + ctrl key) then scale(S) and move the sections as needed.

The Follow Me tool would be the quickest and relatively easiest way to make a turret, but you have to do it correctly or you will get odd results. Just keep in mind when using the follow me tool that you will have two objects. One will be the profile of the turret and the second will be the path it follows (circle). These objects do not physically connect with each other. The circle is just a reference of for the profile to follow. Be sure to select the circle first, then select the follow me tool, and lastly select the profile of the turret and you should get the results you are looking for.

If the turret needs to be smoother than the results you are getting, before using the follow me tool go to the Window drop down menu and open the Entity Info window. Select your circle and you will see in the Entity Info that the default number of segments in your circle is 24 (which means your turret will end up having 24 segments as well...), but you can type in as many segments as you want so get smoother results.

I wouldn't add polygons in SU if the model is going to ultimately end up in 3ds. Add your extra polys in 3ds with its excellent poly modelling tools just so that you know what you are getting as your end result and with much easier and cleaner results. But you can do it in SU using the Artisan plugin and its subdivide or knife tool depending on how much control you want over where the new polys go and how they are organized. Artisans knife tool is one of the least recognized of the best SU plugin tools. Just be sure to use it in orthographic views and probably with your perspective turned off for the most predictable results.

Not sure if I'm clear as to what you are asking, but if just need to move everything in multiple layers to a single layer then select all the layers you don't want and then hit the minus button in the layers window which will then say something like "there are objects on these layers, do you want to move them to default layer or delete..." which you then say you want to move the objects to the default layer (which should be layer zero).

But if you need to explode nested groups try looking at TIG's plugins called 'Explode All Groups', 'Explode Group to Layers' and 'Explode2Groups'. Each of these plugins explode and/or reorganize entities and groups to various capacities depending on what you want to accomplish.

Also note that there are a variety of other plugins as well for Layer management and exploding selections.

If you don't have Artisan you could probably find a grid generator plugin that would work just as well.

So if I understand you correctly, you want to place a grid into a flat outline of a shirt.
If this is correct I would do it like this.

1-draw a sqaure.
2-Use the Artisan plugin to subdivide the square.
3-Unsoften the sqaure so you can see the subdivsions, or turn on your hidden geometry.
4-Make sure that neither the shirt nor the square are grouped separately, or just ungroup both of them.
5-Lay the square on top of the shirt outline which will automatically merge the two as long as both are flat and on the same plane. (If needed use the axes tool and set it to the shirt outline before you draw the square so that both will be on the same plane.)
6-Erase all extra lines existing outside the outline of the shirt.

Discovering the Outliner. All combined I probably wasted a week of my life clicking my way through nested components to get to an object when all I had to do was click on a component's name in the Outliner.

Using Windows 8.1 I see 31.