Clean Up

These tools are to help cleanup degenerate geometry and fill in missing areas of a mesh.

Decimate Geometry

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Decimate Geometry

The Decimate Geometry tool allows you to reduce the vertex/face count of a mesh with minimal shape changes.

Ratio

Ratio of triangles to reduce to.

Vertex Group

Use the active vertex group as an influence.

Weight: Strength of the vertex group.
Invert: Inverts the vertex group.

Symmetry

Maintain symmetry on either the X, Y, or Z axis.

Fill Holes

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Fill Holes

This tool can take a large selection and detect the holes in the mesh, filling them in.

This is different from the face creation operator in three important respects:

Holes are detected, so there is no need to manually find and select the edges around the holes.
Holes can have a limit for the number of sides (so only quads or tris are filled in for example).
Mesh data is copied from surrounding geometry (UVs, vertex colors, multi-res, all layers), since manually creating this data is very time-consuming.

Make Planar Faces

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Make Planar Faces

The Make Planar Faces iteratively flattens faces. This can happen with faces over three vertices and it is a common convention that faces should be kept planar.

Factor: Distance to move the vertices each iteration.
Iterations: Number of times to repeat the operation.

Split Non-Planar Faces

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Split Non-Planar Faces

This tool avoids ambiguous areas of geometry by splitting non-flat faces when they are bent beyond a given limit.

Split Concave Faces

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Split Concave Faces

This tool can be used to convert any Concave Face to convex by splitting the concave into two or more convex faces.

Delete Loose

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Delete Loose

This tool removes disconnected vertices and edges (optionally faces).

Degenerate Dissolve

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Mesh ‣ Clean up ‣ Degenerate Dissolve

This tool collapses / removes geometry which you typically will not want.

Edges with no length.
Faces with no areas (faces on a point or thin faces).
Face corners with no area.

Merge by Distance

Reference

Mode: Edit Mode
Menu: Vertex ‣ Merge by Distance, Context Menu ‣ Merge by Distance

Merge by Distance is a useful tool to simplify a mesh by merging the selected vertices that are closer than a specified distance to each other. An alternative way to simplify a mesh is to use the Decimate Modifier.

Merge Distance: Sets the distance threshold for merging vertices.
Unselected: Allows vertices in the selection to be merged with unselected vertices. When disabled, selected vertices will only be merged with other selected ones.