How can I go about retopo-ing and UV'ing this?

XionXinX

I have this toolbox that is made up of many seperate objects, the handle, the handle brackets, the padlock thing, the latches, the drawers, and grooves on the drawers. How can I go about retopologizing this and getting the baked maps out of it? I usually just have a straight out low poly mesh, but this one has a few subsurfs and I don't want to texture all the extra detail geometry, and the game engine won't play nice with this high poly of an abundant object. Thanks

BARDLER

Well for hard surface stuff I usually model a "medium poly" before I go in and add all the support loops for the sub-d high poly model. That usually gives you a good base and requires only a little bit of tweaking to get it to work right. If you do not have an older lower poly model, then just duplicate your high poly and start deleting edge loops you do not need. That would probably be the fastest way to do it.

XionXinX

I haven't applied the subsurf modifiers yet, so could I just turn them off for a bit and use the un-subsurf version? or would the uv's be messed up with the different topolgy between the high poly and lowpoly when baking? Because some things like the latches look a little different then when they are subsurfed.

BARDLER

Well the UVs of your high poly do not matter, and you do not ever need to unwrap it for game res stuff. Only your low poly needs to be UV mapped because that is what everything is transferred to. However if you unwrapped your high poly then just delete the extra edges and your UVs will be fine.

XionXinX

Ahh. Thanks very much!