Retopology is what you do to a high-poly mesh in order to reduce the poly count and make it more manageable and efficient, particularly with animation.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Blender’s “shrinkwrap” modifier to do some quality retopology
He tries so hard to be scary, but those big blue eyes aren't helping
Why Retopologize?
There are various reasons why you would want to do some retopo on an mesh. Most commonly, you have just finished sculpting something (a character for example) and need it to be animated (or even simply rendered). Obviously, your sculpt has a very large poly count, so the render times will be insane. And if you have a computer like mine, you may not even be able to work with it in the viewport.
So then you need to reconstruct the mesh so that it flows well, is animated better and is essentially simplified and made efficient. After that, you would normally bake the normal map and perhaps a displacement map too, so that your low-poly mesh will look pretty much exactly like your high-poly one.
Usually it’s very difficult to texture a sculpted mesh since it has no real edge-flow. There are no loops to make seams. So when you retopologize, you are able to set the right seams for UV mapping.
Another use for retopology is to simply recreate the topology of a mesh. If you have finished modeling something (perhaps a car) but notice that you don’t have very nice edge-flow, you can simply do some retopology to fix it up and make it more efficient, rather then deleting your original mesh and having to model it all over again.
Lastly, you can use retopology tools to make some basic clothes. Using the shrinkwrap modifier on your model will allow you to make a base for some clothes. Sadly though, there is no magic button for making a character’s clothes
Where to next?
If you’re not a sculpting madman like
Ben Simonds, you should seriously check out
Sculptris - its basically a free version of Z-Brush which does all I need it to. One night of messing around with it and the featured alien/goblin thing above is what came out (no prior sculpting experience – it’s easier than it looks)
And here are some interesting links:
And if you’re still lacking inspiration, here are some awesome sculpts from the Blender community:
- [LINK] – Man’s head – Ben Simonds
- [LINK] – Foot – Ben Simonds
- [LINK] – Gadget dude – Ben Simonds again…
- [LINK] – Dinosaurs – “MmAaXx”
- [LINK] – Shark Ride – Kjartan Tysdal
- [LINK] – Old guy – “Maqs”
- [LINK] – Man and his dog – “andy_a”
- [LINK] – Old man – Jeepster
- [LINK] – Surreal elephant – Jeepster
- [LINK] – Poseidon – Jeepster once more!
(If any of these artists want me to remove their image,
email me)
Got a sculpt? Show it off in the comments below!
Please? ^_^
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