I've been digging around online and can't seem to find any formulas for 3D mesh simplification. I'm not sure where to start but I generally want to know how I could make a function that takes in an array of vertices, indices, and a float/double for the decimation rate. And could I preserve the general shape of the object too?

Thanks for the help!

P.S. I was hoping to do something with Quadric Error / Quadric Edge Collapse if that's possible.

Could be because you where searching the wrong term. "Mesh decimation" brings up huge amount of research projects for me, many include detailed explanations.

If you wan't something to copy paste, then consider GitHub but remember to give credit.

Yes, of course. I'd never take someone's work and not give credit for it. However I'd like something more intuitive than GitHub as I enjoy learning from scratch and not using other's code. However I'll definitely look more into that, thanks.

http://hhoppe.com/proj/pm/

http://www.melax.com/polychop

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/meshpapers/GarlandHeckbert2.pdf

Thank you, that was pretty close to what I needed to get me started!

"progressive lod" is another term that may bring up useful results.