Retopology of Complex Objects?

Elarionus

I'm working on a project right now with some full characters and clothing made in ZBrush. The FBX files I received are a little over 10 million per character. The way that I've always retopped in the past is with the Freeform tools in 3DS max. Somebody once recommended Shrinkwrap in Blender, but it only worked for incredibly basic things like rocks or geometric shapes.

I'm 2/5 characters in, and it's taken me around 18 hours. I started thinking to myself, there HAS to be a better way to do this. There's no way the pros hire somebody to sit there and drag polygons across a mesh for that long. Or maybe they do. I don't know. But surely, there's an easier/more automatic way to do this now? In some software like ZBrush/Max/Maya?

Burpee

zRemesher can give you a okay start on some piece, but yeah sometime it's just take forever ^_^". Some software like topogun are easier but at the end it's the same thing if you're retopoing by hand

Alex_J

Take the time to build one good one, then reuse what you can.

Quad draw tool in Maya works fine for me. On humanoid characters you should be able to start out with some pre-made stuff like some base models to save a lot of time.

kanga

I feel your pain! The retopo tools in Blender are really good, but sometimes dragging poly by poly is best. I am working on the most difficult character so far and using shrinkwrap is a question of getting used to the process. You could transfer a remeshed version of the model and just alter it but if the model is intended for realtime animation in an engine then for me its just more efficient to do the process poly by poly. Start with shrinkwrap then place another shrinkwrap over the mesh then apply the first shinkwrap so the retopo mesh fits more closely to the imported ref mesh.

Here is what I have so far:

Cheers

onionhead_o

good retopo takes time. Sometimes it can take more than a few days depending how much time production gives you at the workplace. Im only speaking from working in TV/Film production setting

pior

"There's no way the pros hire somebody to sit there and drag polygons across a mesh for that long. Or maybe they do. I don't know. But surely, there's an easier/more automatic way to do this now?"

There are two ways to look at this :

First, on whether or not the "pros hire somebody somebody to sit there and drag polygons across a mesh for that long" : well of course they do, as the definition of hiring someone is basically : paying someone to do something that one doesn't know how to do, or knows how to do but doesn't want to do, or doesn't have the time to do. 

Now the other way to think of it is : speeding up this process is not a matter of automating the end of the pipeline, but rather a matter of developing a good, optimized workflow that saves time every step of the way. Like working as much as possible from clean basemeshes that can then be re-used as a starting point for the retopo phase ; or, as a person doing retopo passes from scratch based on provided sculpts, having a solid library of clean lowpoly bodyparts that you can easily source from and reuse (hands, ears, heads, and so on).

Two characters taking you 18 hours pretty much means 1 work day per character, which doesn't sound too bad at all for a full retopo from scratch. It really all depends on how you value your time, how efficient you are, and of course how much you get paid for the task... One thing for sure : if someone is paying you to retopo these 5 characters, they very likely do *not* expect you to do it using an automated solution since bruteforce automatic retopo is always wasteful and kind of ugly, especially if the budget is tight. Now if this is voluntary/free work this is a whole other story of course.

Overall if you feel like this is taking too long then maybe it is not really a matter of speeding up the retopo process, but rather, a matter of picking up an art style that does not requires polygon soup zeebrush sculpts and retopoing everything to begin with. But of course that's only possible if you have some say in this decision to begin with.

All that said : good luck ! With 2 characters done out of 5, you're almost half way done.

Alex_J

Before the pneumatic nail gun, wood buildings were built by hammering one nail at a time. You know how many nails it takes to frame a house? 

So carpenters from those days were really, really fast at hammering nails. They could sink 2 inch nails in a single swing -- loading the nails in their hands so that they could sink them rapid fire. Almost as fast as nail guns. 

Then the nail gun came along and sped up the process... but it's still a lot of work. 

Probably a lot of the difficulty comes from feeling slow and inefficient just due to lack of pratice. I'm sure by the time you finish these 5 characters, you will be pretty fast and confident with re-topology.

poly_troubleshoot

zRemesher or SimplyGon. If it does an ok job, then you can brush it up manually. Retopo is an art in itself. If you use Maya, then look up the hotkeys to the modeling toolkit. It will make life so much easier. The shells that come in ass awful should be retopo’d manually. In either case, tools make things faster. My saying is, if life in modeling feels excruciatingly tedious and painful, you’re probably doing it wrong.