Retopologizing very complex, hard to reach crevices within in a model ?

Raphael_Bouch

Hello everyone,

As the title says I have a 3D bust sculpt in here I need to retopologize. Whilst there's nothing complicated in it in appearance there is that leaf crown, with very little spaced crevices that makes it an absolute pain to retopo.

How would you tackle with this ? Note that the leaves are welded to the head not separate meshes. It's like one huge block of marble to retopo.

Thanks in advance !

ZacD

I'd model the front of one leaf, copy it, move it around to the front of every leaf, and shrink wrap it, and then thicken them all. If it was acceptable, I'd consider leaving them separate interpenetrating pieces of geo.

Alex_J

not sure what program it is, but if you have some sort of paint select faces so you can relatively easily make a select of individual leaf and then isolate select that plus your new mesh, that should help with visibility issues.

if using a quad-draw type thing where new geo sticks to the old surface, it can sometimes help to only fill in the spots that are easy, then disable the live surface and fill in the remainder manually, and then reenable quad draw to "stick" the new parts more closely to mesh. or just select individual components and manually move them if the live mesh is being fussy.

it is tedious but a lot less tedious if you dont try to fight the limitations of live surface and just use it where it is useful and use other tools where it is not. took me too many hours to figure that out.

buldozzzer

Similar manual retopology is the only option. I would have rotopo of one leaf, and shrinkwraped the result on the rest of the leaves. And then began to fill the gaps between leves. 

pior

The best way to deal with this ... is to think of the final model game model as you sculpt, as opposed to considering the two steps as separate. And also, even starting on the lowpoly model *before* finishing the sculpt. The low is what goes in the game, therefore it's the most important.

Raphael_Bouch

Thank you all for your answers !

What about ZBrush Zremesher ? I heard it produces meh topology for animations/hard surface but gives you a directly usable lp for organic stuff.

Alex_J

only reason i didn't mention is because you asked specifically about manual retopo techniques, but yeah for something that isn't going to deform, there probably isn't much downside to using an autoretopo and being done with it in five minutes.

There is like a logical fallacy that if you do things in a harder, slower way that always means result is better. But I think it is better to look at the total situation on case by case basis and consider your goal. While perfectly efficient topology for the backside of a sculpted hairdo might make you feel nice, if it takes 45 minutes to accomplish the same goal as 5 minutes would have done then you just wasted time for nothing.

But the clean topology may help in your texturing process so you have to look at the total effort. Good thing about autoretopo is that you can test is quickly and see if it will cause issues later in your workflow or not without too much effort.

iam717

It is super difficult (i suppose) but i try to add both high and low together when creating objects, granted some curves make things more difficult and sometime you still have to eventually model the low or edit the current low, sometimes it works out for me other times (its manual retopo but ahead of time, makes editing(changes) harder i suppose) like the most recent (robotic design) it made things a little more difficult, which just comes from the exporting from many applications than anything else.  (if i could "hack/edit" revere engineer any of the stuff or things or had enough money to pay a team to, I'd somehow utilize the best of all the "worlds" and have some sort of external app that loads aspects of what i need that work from each, is that even possible one wonders. )  Probably never get it.

I hear topogun3 is the sex, no one mentioned it so i thought i would, you didn't mention the application you are using.

To add more that others might've said, just push them into the background more unless they really need to be sticking out, would make life easier.

Neox

Tbh this isnt a job for retopology, but "pre" topology. Just model that things once, uv, sculpt and then clone it around the surface. Now you do it a couple dozen times.
Even if meshed in, i would go this way and have it prepped and reuse.

Now i would likely make one, duplicate, and wrap over the others, but it's needlessly complicated and annoying to do now

I guess if you put the pivot at the tip, placement and adjustment will be somewhat more simple.