Some question about low\high poly mesh (before baking)

Offy163

Dear guys, after watching some tutorial i have some question.

Why somebody make at first low poly, and after this high-poly.

Why somebody make at first high-poly and after this low poly?

What is different? 
The matter is in preference?

Larry

These are 2 types of workflow. From what i've seen , High to Low poly is mostly used when making organic models. They first sculpt the character with anatomical details since it is faster to sculpt than block out an entire human body made of polygons. So they basically sculpt a human body made of millions of polygons (or triangles, depending on your way of sculpting) and then they use some tools like topogun which shoot vertices on top of the surface and connect them together, resulting to a body that has about the same figure, but its topology varies up to 10 thousand polygons.That way you can first sculpt what you had in mind, and then create the topology according to what you have sculpted, to be animation friendly, and "bake" the details with a normal map.An exception to this rule would be that some experienced people already have created a very good base human body that is animation friendly and has low topology as a starting point, which they subdivide and sculpt on. But that could be a generic-average figure human body for general purposes.

For hard surface modeling, you almost always start from a low poly model as most non-organic items have some sort of geometric shapes in them, making them easier to handle and block out. You dont want to start adjusting a simple box made of 3 million polygons, do you? Better start with 6 sides cube, and keep adding smaller shapes in it! Then you copy it, subdivide it, making it high poly,sculpt any details you want, and then bake it down again to the low poly to keep your details, but not the geometry

Offy163

Larry  thanks, i got it!)

EarthQuake

The most common workflow is neither of these, but rather:

Blockout - this is a low detail, often rather primitive mesh but is not a "low poly" in the traditional sense. This could be built with standard poly modeling tools (common with hard surface but sometimes used for organic stuff as well), or from a base mesh (usually poly modeled with traditional techniques as well) or from a sphere to block out basic proportions before being retopo'd to a more useful topology

Highpoly - once your proportions are set, you create the high detail model.

Lowpoly - once the highpoly is done, you create the lowpoly. It's difficult and generally counter productive to create the lowpoly first, because generally you will still be tweaking the proportions and overall forms to some degree during the high poly stage, which means the low would no longer fit the high if you started from a game ready low poly asset. Depending on how you work, you may be able to use the blockout as a base for the low poly.