instant-meshes VS retopoflow

there’s a free Windows program called instant meshes that’ll do it.

It sounds like you want better automatic retopology methods. There's Instant Meshes, which is decent, and Retopoflow, which is very good, but not automatic and not free. There's nothing that's fully automatic that's completely satisfactory, though.

Maybe checkout Instant Meshes for retopo?

There are other useful things available on Linux too— I use Substance 3D Painter from Steam for texturing, Krita for concept art and retouching, and this neat little tool for retopology. Again, nothing you can't get on Windows too, but it's so you know what you count with. You get a stable and reliable OS, full desktop customization to make it fit your own workflow, and a cool community in exchange. Whether that much is worth the tradeoffs depends on you.

Exactly. Run it through https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes then extract a normal map.

To be quite frank, you haven't really given quite enough context at all, but going out on a limb here the most common culprit of 3d files being too big is that they have an unreasonable amount of polygons. you can fix this by using the remesh tool/modifier (which will likely require some smoothing in the sculpt tab afterward) or using the decimate modifier. additionally if you're willing to use a secondary program, you could try a re-topology program such as instant mesh which is free, small, and the most clean & efficient at what it does, but if you aren't going to be doing 3d work often, its not necessary. After your poly count is low enough, export it as an OBJ or FBX file, and you should be good to go.

I’d switch to zbrush for this and project this mesh onto an already topology-correct one. If you don’t want/can’t use zbrush, and you’re out of options you might as well just give instant-meshes a try as it’s a free tool. I had somewhat successful results https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes

Instant meshes (https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes) is a free software that is very good at remeshing while preserving details

here’s the link I saw that at. What do you think?

https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow You can get it off Github for free if you're using it for educational purposes

you can try it out for free to see if you like it https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow/releases

I think the best program for this would be RetopoFlow 3. You can buy it here: https://blendermarket.com/products/retopoflow/. You can also get it free here: https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow. It's not automatic, but it's capable of really cleaning up models. The free version is released by the same people that make the paid version, you just don't get support from them if you get it from their GitHub instead of buying it.

Use Retopoflow addon. It's free on github. Also in my opinion it's better than Maya's quad draw

Retopoflow can be downloaded for free on GitHub https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow

PSA: Retopoflow is also completely free on the developer's github page, you just dont get any customer support with this version. https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow

The same applies to anything that links to Blender code, including its Python modules. This means the same policy applies to all add-ons. For instance Retopoflow, which is ~$90 if you buy it, can be accessed for free on GitHub with no restrictions