Maya Reduce Poly Plugin

A simple plugin for visualizing mesh reduction in Maya
Full Demo

About The Project

The algorithm is based on a paper from 1998: A Simple, Fast, and Effective Polygon Reduction Algorithm which collapses vertices with the lowest cost one by one. This gives a great visualization of the poly reduction process.

The limits are that it takes a lot of time to process high poly mesh, and it only works for triangular meshes. A possible optimization is to compute to desire poly-count, store the vertex order and then re-construct the mesh all at once, but that would lose the slowly-reduced visualization.

Getting Started

The Plugin is compiled for Maya 2018

1. Download the latest plugin release

2. Load the reduceCommand.mll in Maya through Plug-in Manager

Usage

The plugin is a custom command plugin, once the plugin has loaded, you should be able to run it with maya.cmds.

I strongly suggest using a mesh under 3000 vert-count as the algorithm is not optimized yet. The plugin also only supports triangle meshes.

1. Select the mesh you want to reduce in the scene

2. Execute using reduceCmd() of desired reduce rate using percentage flag. The percentage is how much vertices you want the mesh to remain compared to the original. (example: A mesh with 1000 verts will be reduced to 200 verts after running withpercentage=20)

   import maya.cmds as cmds
   cmds.reduceCmd(percentage=50)