Simplify a model?

[N0ught]

I use wings 3d and I was wondering:

I know how to smooth models, but is there a way to simplify them instead, to make them less detailed? Like smoothing in reverse?

I have made a bandolier for my mod, but since I used the bullets I modeled it has a poly count of around 18000. Needless to say, I would like to cut that down, and I don't want to have to replace 90 bullets individually.

Any ideas? I have seen the .lod files in the .brf file editor - these seem to be what I'm going for. How do I make these? or are these specially made, individually textured, low-poly models? Any help is much appreciated.

 

[HokieBT]

All the LOD's my team makes for the star wars mod have to be individually created lower-poly models.  If there was a way to automatically reduce polys that would be great, but I don't think there is one....

 

[Barf]

there are tools but they have complications in themselves it would be faster to simply make a tiny 10 triangle bullet and duplicate it 90x
even then you'd end up with a 900 triangle bandolier, blender has a duplicate along curve process to handle things like this,

Spoiler

(http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modelling/Objects/Duplication/DupliFrames)

im not sure about wings 3d

 

[jik]

If you own any version of 3DS/MAX, they have a tool that will "optimize" a model.  This tries to remove vertices that lie on the same plane as others.  I don't know wings or blender, but look for something like optimize.

You could do this manually, by removing vertices and rebuilding faces, but again, I only know max.