Seeking a more efficient retopology workflow

Steve Schulze

I'm in need of a quicker way to deal with retopology. Currently I'm working with 3D Coat. Results are perfectly acceptable from a quality standpoint, but it's a fairly arduous and time consuming task. Given time tends to be a bit on the limited side where I work and there's likely to be a lot of complex meshes - Marvelous Designer clothing with all of their asymmetrical wrinkling and such, I feel like I need to get a lot quicker so that I can't spend more time on making things pretty and less on making them functional.

I'd wager this is a not uncommon problem. What're people using or doing to make things more efficient? I've got 3D Coat, Maya and ZBrush to hand and would consider throwing down a few extra bucks for something that made this process less of a pain in the buttocks.

kanga

Steve, this is probably the most interesting post I have encountered here on tech talk. I don't have any answers for you but its a great question. I tried 3D Coat when it came out but it wouldn't run on my laptop (at the time) so I abandoned it. Since then it seems to have developed some very swanky retopo tools. Dunno if there is a better alternative out there. The only thing I can think of is using zremesher for the bulk of the work, but you would still have to tinker with the mesh to get it functional.

I hope you get some interesting responses. I will be following this topic with great interest!

Cheerio

musashidan

This is indeed an interesting post. You're a professional character artist who wants to 'makes things pretty rather than functional'??

I'm guessing you are not that popular with the rigging department....

Manual character retop is pretty much bread and butter to an artist working professionally at a studio. I'm actually pretty interested in how this affects you in work.

Whilst there are auto-topo solutions that can give you a headstart, there is no way around the fact that a production asset character is going to involve manual retop. Whether it's ZB, Maya, or 3dCoat, you'll have to settle on this fact.

Maya 2017 update 3 has a nice environment for manual retop. Have you tried it?

FourtyNights

In my opinion, it's essential to keep manual retopology skills at hand, especially when you'll need to retopo something unique from time to time.

But for example the most retopologized organic shapes are human heads and bodies with their corresponding limbs and parts, and that's getting quite repetitive in each project. I think it would be better to create a couple of really good heads, hands, bodies etc. with the best possible topology and edge flow for animation, and reuse them on specific projects. What I mean by that, that you'd have a low, medium and high poly topologies to use on your projects, depending on the goal. If it's stylized, maybe go with low or medium, or if it's a realistic one, go with higher density topology.

And I think the software called Wrap3 from R3DS | Russian3DScanner is the best solution to speed up the worklfow in that case:
http://www.russian3dscanner.com/