Making retopology great (...again?) - Share your tips & tricks!
Hey peeps,
Something I've been fighting with the
past few days in my production pipeline is retopology - especially following the form of an organic model to create a mesh with clean spans for rigging and animation (so autotopo and decimation tools tend to
create more work than help).
I can generally create a highpoly
model in X amount of time, but am finding retopoing to take 3X,
sometimes even 5X that amount. I can't help but feel like I'm doing
something wrong.
I'm currently bouncing between ZBrush's ZRemesher,
3DCoat's retopo tools, and Maya's Modeling Toolkit. I've gone through what feels like hours worth of tutorial videos online inbetween frustratingly tweaking individual vertices, but usually end up closing videos after seeing someone doing the same thing, saying to myself, "Really?? THAT's how they're doing this??"
What is
your approach when retopoing a highpoly model (in my case, a dense character or prop that will be animated)? Have any specific tips / tricks
that help you along the way? Whats your biggest time saver (maybe it
even happens outside the retopoing step)? What is something you suggest to avoid doing?
Replies
I would also recommend to not start in a corner and build from there, build everything at once.
@lotet : I typically try to stay as low as possible, but some of the forms I'm dealing with are highly irregular and uneven. If I start too low and add loops later, some of the vertices get "thrown" to other nearby surfaces or collapse the geometry altogether.
@Sunray : the polypaint guide tip is awesome! I'll definitely give that a try
@Jakro : I currently use quaddraw in the Modeling Toolkit the most. I just find the tedium of placing individual vertices frustrating... it makes me feel like there's got to be a better way after awhile.
Also, you're totally right about where I posted this... any chance a mod can move it over to technical? My bad.
you must be doing something seriously wrong if something as simple as adding loops is causing that much trouble.
can you post a screenshot or something so we can see what your working with?
Working low has been the best approach, but vertices tend to get moved into nearby "crevices" when adding edgeloops to the lower poly cage. Even if its just a bit, it ends up being enough displacement where I can't just smooth the verts into place and have to move them manually back vert by vert.
@Jakro : thats a good suggestion for some of the characters that come into production.
@bigodon : ZRemesher and other autotopo tools are great... when they can get me about 80% of the way to the final mesh. I always expect to do some cleanup and tweaking. It's when they only produce about 20% of something useful that I start questioning their output.
honestly, I would probably do a proper lowpoly for the bottom half in this case, and then just use something like decimation master for the top, and then stitch it together.
I was bored so I even made an example.
Yea... the art direction and overall approach of this piece didn't quite make retopoing easy.
I think what's going to help the most is just planning better from the start of an asset, even before sculpting