Hi,
I’m just wondering what workflows anyone recommends for retopo of hi-poly characters to low-poly for games. There is so much online (like this or thiswhich seem great but old) and a lot of it is outdated…since Zbrush came out with UVMaster and ZRemesher in R7 it seems like that is the easiest…but it seems like TopoGun, 3DCoat etc are still very popular.
Any recommendations?
Lately I’ve been doing: hi-poly sculpt/paint, duplicate, decimate the dupe, click zremesher (lazily not doing anything other then pressing the button), UVMaster, projecting the hi-poly detail/polypaint onto the lower res mesh, exporting the low-poly into blender, rigging and exporting the fbx. The problem with this is by just clicking the zremesher button I have too many polys when all my subtools are combined and things like facial detail gets lost, is impossible to morph, looks bad, etc. Are artists doing everything from retopo to UV unwrap in Zbrush nowadays or should I learn some other program to do all that? I don’t see any projecting of hi to low in these tutorials either…how else is there to get hi detail onto low?
I work alone so I’m looking for a workflow that isn’t going to take me a month to do one character.
Thanks for any advice
You can do it from within Zbrush if you want to, it has the automatic method which works pretty well, but you can even do it manually in Zbrush if Zremesher doesn’t do a good enough job. I don’t know how well it does with UV mapping though. Doing it in a different app like 3ds Max/Maya/Blender might be more precise though not as convenient.
Zremesher works miracles but you will have to do some work. You can adjust the polycount with the slider that says “Target Polygons Count” Also for the face you can use the “Use Polypaint” and just paint the areas where you need it to be more dense.
Also make sure your character’s face/head is scaled up larger on the UV map, typically faces have x2 the texel resolution as the rest of the body.
ZBrush lets you retopo manually, you don’t have to use remesher if the results aren’t acceptable.
Modo is also good at retopo of hi res geo. Recently, Maya has finally gotten good at retopo work (2014 and up).
For UV mapping, UVMaster (ZBrush) is good. Maya with the Ninja Dojo plugin is great for just about everything.
However, one of the best UV unwrapping tools out there is Headus; it’s amazing and once you use it, you will be hooked and wonder how you ever unwrapped UV’s without it.
awesome thanks for all the replies! gives me a few things to try.
Hi,
Also Blender is a nice tool for manualy retopo and especialy for unwrapping i think its nice.