Retopo with varying heights?

kdobkowski

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to do a retopo of a high poly stylized wooden floor. (don't mind the weird shading artefacts, TopoGun is acting up for some reason)



I have attempted this with different techniques (not sure if you could call them techniques lol).

First one was to take each plank and make it 40 - 60 polys each, bake and reassemble the planks together.



But I was told it's not the best thing given I want to put the floor UE4 building.

So I was suggested to make more basic bigger shape and let the Normal maps do the work, but what I want to do is to preserve the height information for the planks to give this uneven feel as seen below:





Blue planks are the lowest height, Green are the middle ground and Red are the highest. The idea came from Sea of Thieves, you can see it in the picture below:



I then attempted at making separate shapes with different height and merge them with the rest of the bigger faces which turned out quite messy.

When I tried abstracting the shapes a bit I ran into this little issue:



I can't seem to figure out how to connect these shapes without making a mess.

I could keep going but I feel I'm going the wrong direction

Could someone help and make a visual representation of how a good retopo mesh would look like on this example or similar one? In paint with different colors or something hehe, or just give a tip or some direction in how to do this right.

Thank you so much in advance!

pior

Typically, these kind of issues are not quite coming from retopology limitations or lack of features - instead, they tend to come from the assumption that one necessarily has to follow a linear process like :

Polygon soup Zbrush model > Retopo > final ingame.

There is a very, very small chance that the SoT artists worked that way.

Instead if you simply focused on building a solid, detailed lowpoly right from the start (and exporting it to your final game/engine on day one), then everything would be in place for you to either sculpt your high + bake later, or, not even do any baking altogether and simply tile a generic texture over everything.

In short : think less in terms of linear youtube tuturials telling you to do this then that in a linear order, but rather : think about the game context first and foremost. Things will click and the whole process will be 5x faster since you'll be able to iterate at any time.

I hope this makes sense.

kdobkowski

I took your advise and actually decided to step back and maybe not over complicate things. So I have done the retopo in blender by creating simple shape and just baking the data onto it, that's the result: