Still learning how to go from high poly to low poly

Chase

Throughout all the tutorials I've watched they usually take the high poly, delete the unnecessary edges and turbosmooths to get the low poly. I know you have to keep the silhouette of the high poly. Then there's retopologizing the high poly to get a low poly version? Here's the top piece that's the high poly of my weapon. I know that there are some smoothing errors to fix.



Would I just take that whole thing into Topogun and retopologize it to get the low poly? So I could take this into Zbrush, add scratches and dings, decimate it to a lower poly count while still maintaining its overall shape, export to Topogun, retopo to get the low, bake out the normal map and voila? How would I go about keeping the silhouette if just wanted to delete the Nurbs I've applied instead of retopoing?

Bigjohn

Nurbs? No, you wanna use subdivs. Meaning just model a low poly and put turbosmooth on top. That way when you remove the turbosmooth, you still have a lowpoly cage there. You could also just take the turbosmooth down to subdiv1 instead of removing it altogether. That should be pretty close to the original, and you'd just do a bit of work removing some extra loops that don't add anything to the lowpoly.

passerby

or instead of deleting the support edges and stuff, i like to make my blockout, shape kinda medium poly, and copy it twice, on one copy i add support loops and subdivide, and the other copy i optimize the best i can.

or just do your highpoly and use retopo tools, to build a new mesh around it.

Chase

Here's what my geo looks like as far as my low vs high



The right has the turbosmooth applied so just removing it isn't gonna work. Do I just need to add more support edges to the low using the high poly geo, ie just delete the edges from high leaving the edges that support the overall shape?

Bigjohn

Just subdivide it once, then optimize that. It wouldn't be that hard. Just select some loops and delete them.

Don't optimize the fully subdivided one.

jaalto

Bigjohn wrote: »

Just subdivide it once, then optimize that. It wouldn't be that hard. Just select some loops and delete them.

Don't optimize the fully subdivided one.

This.

Chase

I follow your guy's advice and this is what I was able to get to



Any other edges I delete will mess up the structure so what's my next step? It's still 900 polys. Do I start welding faces?

WarrenM

I disagree. There are tons of loops you can delete there without significantly impacting the shape. The silhouette is all that matters.

Chase

The key word being significantly impacting the shape though. I was under the impression you don't want to change anything about the shape. Like if I delete the loops in the middle, the inner circle would have corner edges instead of the smooth ones.

Snader

This took me between 15 and 20 minutes to make from scratch - just eyeballing your image. You can't tell me that you seriously cannot optimize that model any better without losing detail.

400 tris, btw. So you've got something to aim for

Chase

That's what I'm trying for haha. Like I said I don't have any experience with going from high to low or vice versa. When I make my low I don't think of how the low poly will translate geo wise. Right now I'm just going around deleting edges and reconnecting verts to make larger quads. I started that down the middle of the mesh....



Is that pretty much what you did?

I feel like the very first stage of creating a model, ie edge placement, is crucial or else you'll get a hot mess like what I have going on. Here's the plane I extruded from...

Ace-Angel

No, as Snader said, they literally just constructed it old-school style, without any fancy gimmicks. Just good old poly-modeling. Hand by hand, which will take about 15 minutes tops for the modeling you have been struggling with.

In your case it should be even easier, since you have the HP, so you could a plethora of tools to get that shape via Retopology like methods (hell, just even plane modeling one face and then applying a shell modifier is all you need).

I honestly suggest you go back to basics, look up a few tutorials, follow them, and tackle simpler models which don't have so many curves, and while at it, redo the Low-Poly for your model, because you could have saved up alot of time if you have the correct topology in the first place.

Chase

I'll give the retopoing a shot later on, but I went back and redid my low poly so that the edge transitions were smoother. I was just putting edges in willy nilly without really thinking about how they'd conform to the overall shape. Rookie mistake. I constructed the shape by shift dragging edges, which is what I think you mean by old school poly-modeling. Here's what I ended up with. On the left is the flat plane, and the right is a shell modifier with some scaling. 500 tris. Much better then what I had originally.



I can see where a few extra edges and a little more clean would make the corners look a little more round.

nufftalon

A good trick in 3ds max is build your block out first then add an edit poly mod and do all your extra edges such as supporting edges in the mod then on top of that add your turbosmooth mod. Then to get the low poly you just delete the turbosmooth mod and the edit poly mod with all your supporting edges in it.