I know this is a topic that has been brought up, but my specific question is when it comes to environmental modeling. If I am making statues, stone walls, etc. should I just use decimation master or should I re-topologize it in Maya? Is there much of a difference between UVing in ZBrush using appropriate poly-groups to help with cuts or should I do it in Maya? I have conflicting answers from professors and friends. I have often just used ZBrush decimation from env. assets and UV’d in ZBrush and it’s always come out with clean UVs. Is there a better or more ‘professional’ way to do this?
You can use decimation for doing something like an LOD for things that are far away, but not to create the game-ready mesh. Zremsher can do ok at times but usually you would get better results retopologizing manually. You can do that in Zbrush or Maya, it doesn’t matter.
The decimation tool in Zbrush is mainly used for lowering a high poly mesh down to an acceptable vertex count so it can be exported for baking textures in another application. It is not meant as a tool for making good UV’s.
The 3 main tools that I use in Zbrush for topology is
- Zsphere topology tool
- Topology brush
- ZRemesher
Okay so I’ll stay away from decimation for game-ready retopo, but my professor has told e ZRemesher isn’t a good way to retopologize either. I’ll try learning Zsphere topo tool and topo brush, or stick with quad draw.
Zremeshers use depends on the asset. If you’re doing rocks for example that’d be ok. And you can always tweak the topology it generates as necessary after the fact. For more, I guess you could say, deliberate objects you’re going to want to do manual retopology. I haven’t used Mayas retopo tools, but they seem to be quite similar to 3DCoats. I used Zbrushes a long time ago and found them to be somewhat lacking in comparison.