[Blender] Is my low-poly mesh worth attempting to retopologize or should I restart?

99499

The above image is a little thing I've been working on for a while. Now that I take a look at this monstrosity I've created this thing has no type of grace or consideration for good topology, especially on the arms. Now I'm wondering is it worth attempting to retopologize this mess or should I just start over form square one?

I'm asking this because I have no experience in retopologizing. From what I understand it is a way of correcting poor topology such as this but I have only ever seen this done on high poly characters, not so much on low poly ones. So I'm trying to get some feedback on how I should proceed from here.

rollin

Retopo is the process of building a mesh on-top of another. It's not making anything easier. 

But one tip I can give you as I struggled with this type of model-state myself. Remove all not completely necessary edges until your shape and topology is how it should be. Then you can add additional edges or edge loops. Whenever you have the feeling you're overwhelmed by the amount of points and edges just get rid of everything not completely necessary. I bet you can remove more then half of what's in there and still get a better shape and topology.

Also make the arms and legs not with too many sides. It's easier to work with 5-6 sides and then increase them whenever you're done with the basics.

Because I see you're struggling how to get all the edges of the hands to line up with the shoulders and it just gets messy there bc you haven't figured out your mesh flow yet.

To come back to your question. If you work down from what you have or retopo on-top is up to you. It will take you some time anyway but I would suggest cleaning up what you've got and not start another mesh.
Retopoing is _usually_ used to get a low resolution mesh of a high resolution mesh and not to clean up a mesh.

99499

rollin said:

Retopo is the process of building a mesh on-top of another. It's not making anything easier. 

But one tip I can give you as I struggled with this type of model-state myself. Remove all not completely necessary edges until your shape and topology is how it should be. Then you can add additional edges or edge loops. Whenever you have the feeling you're overwhelmed by the amount of points and edges just get rid of everything not completely necessary. I bet you can remove more then half of what's in there and still get a better shape and topology.

Also make the arms and legs not with too many sides. It's easier to work with 5-6 sides and then increase them whenever you're done with the basics.

Because I see you're struggling how to get all the edges of the hands to line up with the shoulders and it just gets messy there bc you haven't figured out your mesh flow yet.

To come back to your question. If you work down from what you have or retopo on-top is up to you. It will take you some time anyway but I would suggest cleaning up what you've got and not start another mesh.
Retopoing is _usually_ used to get a low resolution mesh of a high resolution mesh and not to clean up a mesh.

Thanks for your post. I did consider both but I watched a few videos on retopology and thought it looked easy enough so I tried that anyway just to get the experience for it and I wasn't confident in trying to correcting my topology, didn't even know where to start. But I retopologized it from ground up and it wasn't difficult per se, just time-consuming. But I am highly satisfied with the new result.