"Glue" a retopo'd mesh to the original mesh for animation?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I wasn’t sure whether this would go in modeling or here, so bear with me :slight_smile:

I have to use a fixed topology for my mesh, so I’m using retopo to more or less to get it placed onto another model that doesn’t have the fixed topology restriction. Problem comes to animating it. Is there a way to “glue” the vertices of the retopo’d model to the original model so that it follows the animation movements?

2

Why not just parent the retopoed mesh to the armature and just use that mesh instead of the one with the bad topology ?

3

Problematically, the retopo has a higher number of verts than the original (so I’m using shrinkwrap, rather). A subsurfaced head may have only a hundred or so actual control vertices, but to get that model into the particular game I’m working with, I have to take a predefined shape (sphere, cylinder, plane) consisting of a fixed topology of 1024 vertices and conform them to the original model. Having that model control the animations of those verts rather than moving them myself, and weight painting only one model would be really nice, and give me a lot more control.

Then again, I could be very wrong. Does anybody have some insight?