Making Retopology bearable

Apheleion

So i am just wondering if anyone has any tips or tricks to make retopology bearable, i love modeling and the painting and texturing but i lose a lot of stream during the retopology, any and all information would be greatly appreciated.

thomasp

depends what you're modelling. always worth it to start with a decent basemesh in my opinion. for example i have not retopo'd a human head/body... ever. would never occur to me to start it from some blob shape.

however, for general retopo purposes this app is very handy and worth trying out: http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/instant-meshes/

Apheleion

I'm retopologizing a colt revolver i made, the original file got corrupted but i had a obj of it for the highpoly so I'm using 3DS Max  to retopologize it using step build.

Apheleion

this is what i am retopologizing

musashidan

You could just optimise the high-poly instead, if retopo isn't your best suit. Use the Optimise tool in graphite freeform tab.

MrOneTwo

Yeah just slowly remove the loops you don't need. Just use some tools like selecting every n-th edge (for example every other one) then loop the selection and remove the edges. If you really want a proper low poly and only have this obj there is no easy way out.

ActionDawg

Honestly these are really simple shapes and you could optimize and UV it from scratch in an hour, tops.

Another option though is that there's the (imo pretty pricey) TurboReverse plugin for Max: http://www.mariussilaghi.com/products/turboreverse
I got this a few years ago and it's great at what it does. Not only does it just unsubdivide a model, but it can do it in two different ways. One is reverting the mesh all the way back to the raw original. The other is unsubdivide while keeping the overall volume and shape of the high poly. I really like this option for a lot of different things.

These days though, I opt for good old manual retopo for hardsurface shapes like this. You really only have: a box for the frame, trigger and hammer each. A chamfered box for the grip. And 5 cylinders for the rest. Just pull those shapes around, triangulate and it's done.

Apheleion

I think i have a habit of over complicating it in my workflow. When i step build it takes me hours upon hours to make the new mesh ontop of the old one. I guess what i was asking is there a resource i am not using that is built into the program to make the process easier. Unwrapping it will be simple, its just retopologizing feels difficult for me.

Apheleion

Lol sorry when you said insanity it made me crack up, so using step build on hard surface objects is not the way to go about it? I'd love to retopologize correctly without jeopardizing the quality.

Apheleion

Thanks for the information, ill put it to use