Retopo to low poly for more organic and complex shapes?
polycounter lvl 8
I have a bunch of cloth for a character and also some cloth props I need to retopo. Where are we with this in 2021? Is there an easier way these days other than manually? Does Blender have any good plugins for this? ZRemesher isnt doing the trick for me.
Replies
I think doing a cleanup of an auto job is more irritating to me than doing it manually. I've never measured the time involved but it just seems like a lot more work to untangle a zremesher deal versus build a minimal topology manually and then just add in loops strategically.
Still the best way I know of and have seen is - if your models coming from marvelous designer - do the thing where you morph from the 2d layout to the 3d. I can dig up the link to that if your interested. I think it was on lester banks website.
That's assuming you need game/animation topology.
oh yeah that might be very useful. Im going from marvelous to Zbrush and now back to Blender. manually retopoing now in Blender and its just taking forever. I have so many to do.
well searching for it i see mention of a newer thing here:
Free Tool Helps Retopo Marvelous Designer Elements in Maya - Lesterbanks
its maya which you mentioned blender but may be helpful for others anyway.
here is the article I had in mind:
Retopology and Maintaining Marvelous Designer UV’s in Maya - Lesterbanks
again it is maya but I think you probably have a wrap deformer in blender and then it's the same thing.
The newer version of MD had a more robust retopology tool though. I havent touched it much but I think it put out decent results. Better than zbrush anyway from the little testing I did. But for me I find it to be like a 10-30 minute deal to retopo some clothes and I like having fine control from manual placement so I usually do it that way. And I've retopo'd a lot of clothes like that. :)
Might be a faster way to do it but I find it to be pretty easy and mindless work. You can just put on some music and relax and it can be a break from the more taxing jobs.