Quick retopo question
I've been doing a lot of highpoly modeling and was curious if it was worthwhile for me to retopo a high poly model before baking the normals onto the low poly? Or is zbrush decimation tools/quick topo tools efficient enough to bake nice normals for my low poly?
Replies
For evironment and non-deforming meshes, decimation gets the job done, optimization can always come later (that's where retopo and clean up is needed). For characters, I'm certain that's out of the question, character geometry needs corrent geometry flow and edge loops different from static and non-deforming meshes.
It is only worthwhile to decimate for the purpose of rapid prototyping. To see how something will ultimately look like in the product. You will get good normals from a decimated model, although you'll have better control over your seams by retopoing.
Just keep in mind that decimation is not intended to make a final product, but to iterate on something to get you to that product. Whatever gets the job done and ships without problem is always going to be the right way.
I am speaking of high poly to low poly baking. As in, the lower poly model will be my final product and is nice and clean, Do high poly's bake better if they have been retopo'd, decimated, or does it just generally not matter?
your lowpoly model has no way of knowing what your highpoly topology is.
all that matters is your highpoly mesh surface quality rather than its topology. if the surface is clean and looks the way you want then that is how your normal map will look like.
no
there is no such thing as too many polygons. you could even bake a normal map from a 100 million polygon mesh if your machine can handle.
Most of the time they are fine, but depending of your baking software they can introduce artifacts. I have seen some edge softening errors on my decimated mesh used as high-polys in xNormal for example (on rare occasions fortunately).