Retopo after texturing?

GuanAndOnly

Hey folks, but I was wondering if y'all have a good way of retopo-ing something after you've already started texturing?
I had a medium-poly asset that I got partway into texturing before going back and realizing that the topo is inefficient af.
I haven't been able to adjust the topo without altering the uvs, even if I don't touch the seems at all. 

GuanAndOnly

o wait it seems like it only fucks up when I use target weld 

Michael Knubben

You can always bake your old mesh/uv's to your new mesh. You'll likely lose some sharpness, but it could serve as a decent enough base to keep working on!

EarthQuake

Typically what you would do is make a copy of the mesh, uv it, and then bake the textures from one mesh to the other.

Portgas

You could try transferring uvs in Maya via mesh> attribute transfer. You place one mesh on top of another and it transfers the uvs from one mesh to another. You can also transfer vertex positions etc. this way.

Justin Meisse

EarthQuake said:

Typically what you would do is make a copy of the mesh, uv it, and then bake the textures from one mesh to the other.

Could that be a feature added to the Toolbag baker in the future? The ability to bake all the maps from one mesh to the other in one click would be awesome. That could also lead to new pipelines, like a library of fully textured pieces for kitbashing.

GuanAndOnly

Thanks for the quick response guys! Had a feeling it was something that simple but I'm not too familiar with the whole baking pipeline haha. I'll give it a shot. c:

Portgas said:

You could try transferring uvs in Maya via mesh> attribute transfer. You place one mesh on top of another and it transfers the uvs from one mesh to another. You can also transfer vertex positions etc. this way.

This sounds like something that'll save me a buttload of trouble, especially since my saves for most of the iterations of my asset got messed up and I was only left with the fbx of what I'm making lol. Gonna look into this, thanks dud! 

sprunghunt

if you were using substance painter you could just re-import a new mesh with the new geometry. 

Justin Meisse

sprunghunt said:

if you were using substance painter you could just re-import a new mesh with the new geometry. 

Yeah, that's a great feature but it will only work for procedurals or painting you've done inside painter. When I need detailed strokes I paint them in 3DCoat or Photoshop and import it as a mask into painter and those masks won't update to new UVs.

Justin Meisse

oh wow, I just found out Toolbag already bakes those maps from the high. It doesn't bake the normal map though.

lordkc

Portgas said:

You could try transferring uvs in Maya via mesh> attribute transfer. You place one mesh on top of another and it transfers the uvs from one mesh to another. You can also transfer vertex positions etc. this way.

I wanted to say... THANK YOU.

I retopped my mesh about a week ago which helped with sculpting and getting good normal map detail. I also used baking to transfer the image data to the new uvs and I thought it looked decent. Then today I had to get rid of a seam (I left the head alone during retop so it still had its original uvs and original texture data) and realized the baking process blurred my textured data way too much (so i had a visible seam between the sharp detail of the head and the now blurred texture of the neck). I spent hours fiddling with the settings in map transfer to try and eek out some of the original detail back and couldn't.

Then I finally revisited this thread and thankfully saw your post. I just did a quick attempt at transferring the UVs from old mesh to retopped mesh and it looks damn identical to the original mesh when textured. Obviously the UV layout isn't as clean as it once was but I'm fine with that since I won't be painting anymore texture data myself and I couldn't find any seams generated by the process.

Thanks again!