editing riggged mesh

[rn216cc]

Firsst, I want to appologize for the detailed story I am about to say, but I want to make sure I cover my problem and things I have tried.


Problem:
Many of times, after exporting my character from MakeHuman into Blender, I find myself needing to make adjustments to my character so that I can reduce the amount of polygons. This is especially true with assets that come with makehuman by default, such as shoes, eyes, and shirt. From expeirence with Blender, I have noticed collapsing edges does not cause as much of a problem as it does with inserting edge loops. As a matter of fact, Blender even warns you that problems can arise, when using the insert edge loop tool on a rigged character. In addition, the MakeHuman combine meshes only work with assets being joined to a base mesh, and it does not join the assets to a proxy. That is is a big problem for me because my character needs to be combined for UE4.

Things I have tried
Starting with the first method, I tried the best I could to limit the amount of tweaks and tried avoiding of using the insert edge loop tool inside of Bkender, but it sometimes still messed up the vertex weights and/or the shapekeys.

I even tried using MakeClothes, but after importing my clothing into MakeHuman, most of the times the clothes get really distorted or they get distorted if I keep making tweaks inside of Blender and reimporting them back into MakeHuman.

I then stumbled upon Mixamo, which meant that I could do any cleanup inside of Blender, without the worries of having an armature skinned to my character, as Mixamo has software for auto skinning characters. However, and this is really disappointing, Mixamo does not have a jaw bone, and you cannot import MakeHuman's faceshapes and its drivers to a Mixamo rig inside of Blender.

The Question:
So, I am wonder what have others done if they needed to decimate a character or even if they wanted to change an area's edge loop direction. WITHOUT using the decimate modifier, which IMO, is worth crap!