Subdivide flat surface based on maximum edge length?

Is there any technique or modifier that will help with something like I’m imagining?

Suppose I want to re-divide any flat surface so there is a minimum edge length?

Here’s a before-and-after I did manually:

The left side is before. To get what I have on the right, I

  1. Selected all the inner edges and deleted them
  2. Manually went through the outer edges and subdivided them, into more parts the longer the edge is
  3. Through a combination of Extrude Individual, Bridge Edge Loops, and Fill, got the new faces in place.

I don’t expect an automated version to have exactly the same results, but the important part is I can set a maximum edge length. Is there anything that would speed up that process?

The remesh modifier does this brilliantly - except you can’t use it on 2D objects. The ‘scale’ slider sets the maximum edge length, more or less.

Thanks, that’s pretty good. I guess if I really want flat meshes, I could solidify faces, modify it, then delete the bottom vertices.

I’m reading this:

As I can see in the results images there can be a little bit of lost data. Which is probably fine for my purposes. But to try to put my finger on what’s happening: I guess in addition to dividing up faces if they are too large, it’s also merging faces together if they are too small. I’ll play around with this until I think I’ve got it.