Relearning all of 3d, got a few questions including baking and retopologizing.

ahendowski

Hi everyone! I'm finally trying to take a step back, and get a professional / complete mindset on my entire workflow to be a little bit more profesisonal in my work. I've always had some holes in my knowledge for 3d, so I'm trying to clear those up.

Retopologizing:

How do you do more hard surface retopology? There's a few examples where I feel it's MUCH more needed to be exact, since it's machinery. Here's an example of an antenna piece. The spiral is too precise, and I feel it'd awkward to retopologize it. How would I go about converting this to a low poly mesh?



This is how small it is on the actual model:



I find things like this often in hard surface, such as a cylinder sticking out, circular parts poking out. Does everyone just kind of guess it? What I've done is typically just model over it with a normal polygon, like I'll make remake the entire piece, but sometimes it's a little awkward or difficult to line up completely.


That was my first question. Second question involves baking textures and PBR.

Is AO still used in PBR? Or Unreal Engine 4 for the matter?
I'm still new to exploded bakes, are exploded bakes JUST for AO? Or for normal maps as well?

Depending on the answer I have a few more questions involving xnormal bakes.

Stirls

With retopology, namely low-poly retopo, the aim is just to get a working silhouette from all angles. The spring could be done with an alpha if you wanted. Personally, I'd probably just grab a lower-poly cylinder, and extrude some edges to give the impression of a spring.

ahendowski

Stirls wrote: »

With retopology, namely low-poly retopo, the aim is just to get a working silhouette from all angles. The spring could be done with an alpha if you wanted. Personally, I'd probably just grab a lower-poly cylinder, and extrude some edges to give the impression of a spring.

How would I work an alpha into the spring to cover the rod? Also if you just grabbed a lower poly cylinder, would it look like a spring or just really look like a retractable cylinder?

sargentcrunch

n/a

dzibarik

perna wrote: »

So, as a concrete example of that, say you will only be able to use a plain cylinder for the spring, you can choose to just bake it down as-is and it'll look fine from a distance. If you need it to look better up close, you might consider redesigning the spring so that it's closed, no gaps between the "rings". This means it'll match the lowpoly cylinder much better, and people are unlikely to think twice about the redesign.

If you have enough triangles to actually capture the spring silhouette, then that's a no-brainer: just capture the spring silhouette.

Thanks, now I know how to deal with this, it was so obvious.