I work in interior visualization and now I want to switch to UE4 to make interior projects live and interactive. I’ll be grateful if you could help me with some questions:
What retopology program would you recommend for archviz projects - 3D-Coat or Topogan? Maybe some other variants?
Which of them is better for retopology of wrinkles in sofa or clothes such as curtains or bed linen?
Can you recommend any tutorials best suited for archviz retopology for UE4? I found some at digital-tutors such as Browse courses by subject | Pluralsight Getting Started with TopoGun | Pluralsight
But they are for game assets and I’m not sure whether they will be of much help. Maybe you’d advice some other tutorials? I’ve seen some courses like “Creating a walkthrough with 3ds max and UE” or “Architectural visualizations in UE” but they lack information about retopology and texture baking.
I imagine the workflow for archviz in UE4 in the following way:
creating high-poly models (or using existing 3ds max scenes) –> retopology –> baking textures from high-poly to low-poly models –> importing to UE –> creating materials –> arranging lighting properly.
Is it correct?
Depends on what kind of arch viz. If it is a still render, you could get away with doing somewhat medipoly models and unwrapping them, without bakes and texturing work.
However speaking about realtime interactive, the workflow is the same as for games.
Removing edge loops from high-poly manually often yields considerably better results than any kind of automatic retopology for hard surface models.
Wrinkles on sofa usually should not be represented in geometry. Normal map, which you bake from high poly should take care of that.
When you model something, especially if it’s something that starts out very basic, like furniture then it is good practice to keep stages of your modeling saved so that you can go back and get a low poly version of your mesh before you did high poly details. For example, when I’m doing something hard surface and I want to add small details like paneling, I save it out before I do that so that I can go back later to where it was a clean surface so that I can get my low-poly mesh.
Other than that, 3ds Max has retopology tools that work pretty well, it’s under the Freeform tab, using the Conform tools you can model on top of an object. Use the Default Scanline Renderer to bake your normal maps, it’s faster, set the supersampling to Hammersley and it will give the best possible results.