Retopology Help. (Stuck on triangle count)
Hi all,
I have been collaborating with another modeller on here, and he did the high poly, so I offered to do the retopology (which is something I've never done before). However, we have run into a problem with the triangle count budget for Ember Spirit. Pictures are below, and any suggestions on where to reduce would be appreciated, because I am stuck!
The lowest I have gotten the low-poly is 336 triangles, and it needs to be 300 or less. Now I know that when it comes to retopology , many people avoid using anything but quads (or atleast thats what I've been reading), however I just don't see that possible with the budget, so you will see I have used triangles in some spots. If you want the .obj let me know too
Original Concept
I have been collaborating with another modeller on here, and he did the high poly, so I offered to do the retopology (which is something I've never done before). However, we have run into a problem with the triangle count budget for Ember Spirit. Pictures are below, and any suggestions on where to reduce would be appreciated, because I am stuck!
The lowest I have gotten the low-poly is 336 triangles, and it needs to be 300 or less. Now I know that when it comes to retopology , many people avoid using anything but quads (or atleast thats what I've been reading), however I just don't see that possible with the budget, so you will see I have used triangles in some spots. If you want the .obj let me know too
Original Concept
Replies
Also, triangles are your friends so use them. You're just supposed to avoid using them in areas that will deform so something like a sword is perfectly fine.
Sukotto, that is what I thought too, thank you for confirming this!
You can get away with so few polys with a sword like this. This is what slosh is talking about, insert sloppy paint over here:
You can see how your details would just bake in? Just do that, bake it all in
Gotcha! Thanks guys you're help is much appreciated, I didn't know you could bake something that thick or full of depth, figured it would have to be another object.
Exactly, don't model that, just make the blade a bit wider and bake it all in... it tastes great baked
Quads is really about the higher poly models. Much easier to select edges in rings and loops if they are quads. You put in tris and it interrupts that flow.
Also, quads sculpt cleaner than tris (tris pinch).
But low poly has so few edges, and it just uses one smoothing group + normal map, so yeah, quads/tris no big deal.
Originally he thought maybe the retopo mesh had to be all one piece, and not seperate objects for the hilt and blade, but I don't think that is the case, because we we are getting the same results with both kinds of retopos. I believe he used Xnormals for this, but is going to try Topogun. Sorry, we are a bit new to this process as I said in my original post.
Funky Normals
UV Layout
Black Spots on AO
Baking in pieces can help clean up the areas that are really close like the hilt touching the handle corners.
I'm not the best at baking. Generally you should keep the rays as tight as possible, if they are tight enough then you won't get artifacts around corners.
Can you see that black on the model?
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Also, you've got quite a bit of wasted uv space, you can pack that tighter.
And a note about the model, since you're baking the design on the blade you should bevel the edges to show that it actually has depth to it. This is what I mean: http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?action=show&redirect=Normal+Map#Modeling_The_High-Poly_Mesh
Sukotto- I did end up baking seperately because of the overlapping. Thanks!