Workflow question

Judgement45

I"m looking for an efficient way to get a model from high poly to low poly without having to rebuild an entirely new low poly mesh. I'm looking into zbrush and the qremesher tool or zremesher depending on the version. My question is this for those who use Zbrush. Can I get a workflow like this

Base Mesh > High Poly Sculpt > Decimate >

Then use qremesher/zremesher to get a lower poly mesh with quads and then retopo?

GlowingPotato

Well, in my experience, for complex geometry it is really rare to obtain good results without manual retopology (for organic shapes). Subdividing and sculpting, will deform your base low poly mesh (your lvl 1 mesh). And this is not desirable most of the time.

For hard surface, my workflow is low-poly >hi-poly> bake. pretty straight forward

Add3r

I think in this case, you should be looking towards improving your low poly retopo workflow. Are you manually building from primitives in Maya? Or are you using surface snap type tools like the modeling tools in maya? or like 3D Coat retopo?

Decimation usually pumps out pretty dirty, triangulated mesh. qremesher can pump out a pretty solid mesh you can work from and manually push around in like Maya or Max to get the result you want. As GlowingPotato said though, best results will absolutely be from manual retopo solutions where you have 100% control of edge flow. Q and Z rememsher have some pretty powerful solutions now I believe with r6 and r7.

jfitch

Honestly no.
Zremesher is getting really close to being good enough for animation, but there's still going to be some spots where you have to manually work out the topology. If you're doing something for hard surface you *might* be able to get away with having decimated geo, but if that object is going to be moving and rigged, forget it. You'll probably also get hella shading errors.

Get a good retopo workflow--it takes time, but eventually you'll get to the point where its second nature and you can put on a movie and retopo while you watch.

If you're just doing this to get something sculpted and then 3d print or just a high poly render then fuck it, do whatever you want.

Judgement45

Thanks for the input, I guess it's time to start practicing my retopo workflow. Thanks all