Retopologizing hard-surface

mogorodnik

Hey everyone,

A bit of a stupid question, but how does one retopologize hard-surface models? Is it really just manually painting polygons on top of the model and manually matching the low-poly geometry with the high-poly one? What if it's something like a torus or some kind of a spherical surface? Surely it would be mad to manually retopologize something precise like that? I'm trying to get into Fusion 360 and since it's not subdiv modeling oriented i'm a bit unclear coming from Blender and the usual subdiv/baking the high-poly onto the unsubbed low-poly base workflow. Thank you.

fearian

Typically when hard surface modelling you can remove edge loops and reconstruct the high poly to make a low poly model. I haven't used Fusion 360 but surely it can give you a low poly mesh to start from?

For very curved surfaces don't be afraid to start using traditional retopo tools, they can be very quick when you get into them. A lot of people will still manually retopo a whole character sculpt before detailing and baking.

Short answer, for best results, put in the extra effort, it's not as time consuming as it looks.
(and if it's a static environment prop, you can always just decimate )

mogorodnik

fearian said:
I haven't used Fusion 360 but surely it can give you a low poly mesh to start from?

Well, Fusion 360 is like CAD-lite. It gives you a pretty high-poly mesh even on the lowest export settings. I mean, it's parametric, so i guess one could just remove all the unnecessary little detail and do the rest, like unsubdividing curved surfaces, by hand? Guess i'll try that. Thank you for the advice.

2bytes

With CAD modeling you could remodel the nurbs version before exporting as polygons.