Do you always retopo your personal creations?

Andreicus

This is a curiosity of mine, do you always retopo and optmize ( number and resolution of textures) your meshes that you are going to render regardless of the final goal ( portfolio work, fan art etc)?

I'll give you an example: in my case some time I receive videos requests of doing fan art of something like a weapon of a character etc. And I usually do them because it takes only a couple of hours and it's fun but I don't optimize the mesh. I usually make them how I want and with the maximum texture res possible because I know that it's just fan art.
Same thing for other personal projects that will go online but not really meant for the portfolio. 

Instead when I do portfolio work or commercial works I optimize them for real time applications because that's what I do.

What about you? Do you optimize every artwork or not? 

Alex_J

I always do because it's practice. Builds speed, efficiency, and everytime I learn something.

Probably if I'd been doing this 5+ years and working in studio doing the same thing I might not bother though.

zachagreg

I always do to a certain degree, the only times I don't is when the object is particularly unruly and unique. Most of the stuff I make at home I can reuse again so I clean up to avoid myself headaches in the future. It helps to optimize as well and I will usually do a pass after a project to clean up certain objects for reuse and optimization later down the line. I incorporate this as part of my postmortem on projects. 

Cathodeus

If you target a technical proof for your portfolio than answer is yes. (If you want to show that you master polycount, loops, flow, with a wireframe render..). If you target a beauty picture than nobody will care really and it will be a waste of time. Personally when I do personal stuff I don’t care about technical achievements. I already do it for my clients so it free myself to just focus on beauty, design, and shapes.