Retopologizing, shrinkwrapping sculpted heads in Maya

BRUTICUS(CW)

I wanted to start a discussion of shrinkwrapping or retopologizing a low res mesh. Say you have a sculpted head and you have a low res mesh that youd like to wrap around it or something similar to the body of this character at around 5:20 http://area.autodesk.com/gdc/ondemand12

I know you can use Make Live to snap points, i've also thought about Transfer Attributes but that seems to mostly attract vertices near the extremities of the face. I'd love it to work more predictably.

Can anyone suggest other workflows for this type of thing?

I'd love to get that tool being used by Rich Diamant...! I guess most would.

Is there any new tools in 2011 or maybe new 3rd party tools that do this sort of thing? I don't want to remodel... just conform a low res mesh on a sculpted mesh. So I can use the same low res over and over...

thanks for any ideas...

Bal

Most retopo tools can also conform a pre-existing mesh to a hi-poly model, 3D-Coat does it anyways, you can even do it in Zbrush I think.
Not sure about doing it directly in Maya though, Nex maybe? Haven't used it in a while.

Mark Dygert

... Max has those tools. Wrapit & Graphite Modeling "Freeform tools" makes it awesome easy. I really don't know of anything like that for Maya, yet. A lot of what they do in those videos with custom scripts has been in max or is easily available, especially their 3 skeleton system.

When I first watched that video a while ago, I was scratching my head thinking wow they spent time coming up with all those custom scripts when they could of done with max a lot quicker. Still I applaud their efforts and their technical prowess are unmatched, even if they do reinvent the wheel a few times.

CrazyMatt

Well you do have Transfer Atrributes tool you can easily start off with to retopologize your heads to your sculpted decimated heads.

Simple steps:
1. Export decimated / semi-high res sculpted head
2. Import in Maya as .obj
3. Import/load the "proper topologized head" in maya (with the one from zbrush)
4. [can't remember the order] select one of the heads, and then the next one.
5. Select "Transfer Attributes" tool and set it to use Vertex information, press apply.

- Note it may not be dead-on, but it's a wonderful way to start. Because you can set your reference head to use "Live" command and use the soft-selection method to adjust 1 side of the head to fit what parts are mis-projected.

Hope this helps, Cheers!

00Zero

there is a script for maya floating around the interwebs that can shrinkwrap a mesh onto another. its called xy_shrinkwrap or something like that. works just like you described. you can make a cylinder and shrinkwrap it onto a characters arm or something.

found a link

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/modeling/misc/c/xyshrinkwrap