What is the best method for, retopologizing/Texturing a mesh made with booleans?

Necrodark

I am trying to practice hard surface workflows and started out modeling a gun trying to keep good topology but i saw a bunch of people using boolean workflows and getting amazing results so i decided to start suing booleans. I have my model done but now i dont know how to go about retopologizing it so that i can uv map it properly. I cant seem to find any tutorials on the matter. Any ideas?

Mink

You can't find any tutorials because one of the biggest advantages of boolean modeling is you can boolean out a low poly model without bevels, then make a highbpoly with bevels and beveled in details. I've never had to "retopologise" a bolean'd model.

musashidan

Welcome to boolean modeling a production asset  like there's no tomorrow....then tomorrow comes and you have countless tedious hours of unnecessary hard surface retop....

This is fine for concepting or renders, but boolean techniques and when to apply them must be understood in the context of production asset authoring. Chopping geo with no regard for topology leaves you with polysoup. Boolean is best applied alongside traditional modeling, knowing topology requirements is a must. 

pasha_sevez

Check the nearby thread.

https://polycount.com/discussion/206842/polyretopo-the-secret-maya-node#latest

musashidan

@pasha_sevez from the example shown in that thread it still isn't usable optimised game asset topo. Zbrush Zremesher can do the same based on polygroups.

Necrodark

@musashidan
Hey man, thanks for the advice. I usually model with good topology but i kept seeing videos and amazing renders of models with horrible topology and i figured theres got to be a way. I wasnt necessarily modeling it for game asset standards i just mainly wanted to make an asset for rendering. so my problem is more of finding out a way to uv a model with non quad or bad topology, or maybe im doing it wrong .

musashidan

@Necrodark the model you have can easily be optimised without the need for retopo. You can start by removing all the edgeloops that don't affect the silhouette. You will have to do some manual cleanup as well. Your mesh has decent bade topology to do this. In future don't boolean any details the are shallow insets, flush to the surface, or that don't affect silhouette. Those complex boolean models you see may be great for renders or concepting, but will involve all that manual labour is not properly managed for production asset purposes. Booleans and, especially, n-gons are great. I use them all the time. However, I've developed a workflow that relies on a few 'rules' to make it work efficiently.

Necrodark

@musashidan Thanks again for the insight, ive gotten a few courses on hard surface modeling to get better atdoing complex shapes. I would love to hear more about your workflow if you have any guidelines!