how can I create a simplied mesh from a complex base mesh (and do it well)

[Adam]

Hi,

I'm trying to reduce the face count of a complex mesh. After reviewing meshlab a bit, it appears that most surface construction filters create a mesh from a point cloud but none of them backcheck the resultant simplified mesh with the complex mesh for accuracy. It seems to me that meshlab would have a surface construction filter that takes two inputs (a complex mesh and a simplified point cloud), constructs the point cloud faces, and uses the complex mesh to verify those surfaces are likely accurate. Does meshlab have this?

If not, how would you go about this task?

I have tried the following strategies without any luck:
Poisson-disk Sampling -> Surface Reconstruction: Poisson (Blows Up)
Poisson-disk Sampling -> Surface Reconstruction: Ball Pivoting (Ok, not great)
Alpha Complex/Shape (Ok, not great, normals are messed up)
Uniform Mesh Resampling (Blows Up)

Thanks for your help.
Adam

[Denise]

Tony Buser video on Vimeo says don't have octree set to higher than 11 or so else poisson surface reconstruction likely to crash. Let the video run through the Blender demo of decimating to decide if that's useful for your purpose also.
http://vimeo.com/38764290