Retopology methods

dpadam450

Just curious what people are doing these days. For high poly characters is anyone manually making low-poly topology or just using other methods/tools? For me, using a decimate modifier in Blender seems to work pretty well but I don't know if people car about specific edge loops anymore. Maybe in the face or certain areas, but I'm assuming most people automate this now?..

NoRank

I don't actually know for characters, but when you triangulate everything with some kind of decimation you just make your (or someone else) day a pain in the ass. I mean, when you start to UV this, it will get really annoying. 

And I might be wrong but I think that when you do this kind of thing and you use some kind of SSS on your model, it gets really problematic with lighting. 

Popol

I'm pretty sure most character artists manually make low-poly topology because specific edge loops are very important. But if you don't care about your character correctly deforming, feel free to decimate the shit out of it like you would do for a rock.

musashidan

Of course people still care about specific edgeloops!!

Probably now more so than ever, as real-time characters and rigs become ever closer to their cinematic/vfx counterparts.

Unless a character has suitable topology the deformation will be shit.

Also, clients/studios often provide a character basemesh that will be an agreed upon organised(animatable/deforming) topology.

And as mentioned above, a clean mesh that passes down the pipeline and isn't a nightmare for other artists to deal with is expected at a professional level.  

Allowing laziness like this to creep into your workflow is not going to benefit you as an artist.

dpadam450

I had uploaded a fairly decently high poly character that I decimated from a Z-brush sculpt to Miaxmo and it seemed to look pretty damn good, so that's why I was wondering. It auto-rigged it and already had a lot of polies that I think edge loops didn't matter other than a preferred edge flow.

MmAaXx

I use Blender for all kind of retopo, I don't see any other better alternative at the moment. (imo)