Are retoplogy tools like Blender's retopoflow 4 worth it for non characters

ath0rus

Hi, 

For some context I do environment design (hobby) mainly, but I am starting to do more and more modelling instead of depending on others for models or purchased kits. I have been delving into making rocks both realistic ish (with brushes) and stylised with the base Blender brushes. I saw a Mark Kingsnorth retopo addon and I can get an upgrade discount to retopoflow 4. As I really dont have much to do with characters I am curious how useful retopo addons like the mentioned ones would be for optimising any assets I make espically sculpted ones (I know about baking details and I do plan to do that too). Im curious on peoples thoughts

Eric Chadwick

If you kitbash to make your rocks (interpenetrating various models together make a bigger piece) then retopo can help unify the surface, removing all the unused internal triangles.

These retopo tools usually focus on trying to create nice edge flow, which helps improve subdivision surfaces, makes uvs easier to edit, and makes skinning to bones easier.

But most of those things don’t matter much for rocks. You could try it out though and see if it helps with your specific workflow.

ath0rus

Eric Chadwick said:

If you kitbash to make your rocks (interpenetrating various models together make a bigger piece) then retopo can help unify the surface, removing all the unused internal triangles.

These retopo tools usually focus on trying to create nice edge flow, which helps improve subdivision surfaces, makes uvs easier to edit, and makes skinning to bones easier.

But most of those things don’t matter much for rocks. You could try it out though and see if it helps with your specific workflow.

Thanks for the reply, To clarify, the rocks I make fall into two camps: sculpted using Blender's base brushes (Scrape, Inflate, Smooth, etc.) to get a blocky/flat look. Otherwise I use brush packs on a denser mesh for something more realistic. For the brush pack ones I'd just decimate rather than retopo. Where I could see retopo being useful though is on the blockier sculpts and any kitbashed or downloaded models I work with, I don't really touch rocks from asset packs at all.

pior

Well, just because some addon has "somethingsomethingretopo" in its name doesn't mean that you need it for retopo work. The base Blender toolset has all you need, since at the end of the day retopo is just surface snapping.

sacboi

"As I really dont have much to do with characters I am curious how useful retopo addons like the mentioned ones would be for optimising any assets I make espically sculpted ones"

Can be quite helpful not only for organic figurative content sculpted or otherwise but also large scale hardsurface props (vehicles, scifi mechs, aircraft etc) as well if one is pushed for time, that in turn may not allow for manual editing which an 'automated' solution in most use cases, enables. And yes either workflow will provide an optimised proxy, though personally I prefer to retopologise a base mesh by hand simply because permit's for more control.