Is retopology a blender-only thing to do, or is it neccessary too in professional applications and situations?
I am asking, because I often come across tutorials saying “and then we need to retopo!” - a thing that I hate to do.
I was wondering if professional artists don’t have to do this tedious, annoying, boring and simply the most non-interesting part of CGI? Is it blender-only or old CGI software-only?
If I am making organic objects, I usually avoid retopology by box-modelling and sculpting with Multires, then bake the details to my low-pology version, but right now I am making a ship, which needs retopology. There seems no way around it.
Nearly every model requires retopology during production. Often up to a dozen different times. In most movies you watch, “hero” characters have dozens of different models and rigs for different shots. And if you do any kind of sculpting work, you need to get used to retopology being a daily part of life.
Regarding the Retopo part:
Often your customer will just supply you with a CAD model of whatever object he wants to be advertised (cars, power drills, shampoo bottle or whatever). Then you stick a couple of nice shaders onto it place it into a nice studio environment and render the scene.
CAD models usually come with horrible geometry if you like quads and loops and all that stuff. but since they are very accurate and have a very high resolution that doesnt matter.
If your model doesnt need to deform in a certain way like an animated character for example topology is often not that important.
Another place where topology is important is if you want to subdivide it of course.
1.) You probably already know this but, if you’re just making a sculpture or still image, there’s no need to retopo the model. The only reason we do this is so we can rig and animate the sculpt. Well, that and if you’re modeling for games. Almost forgot about that.
2.) ZBrush has something called Z-Remesher. It’s amazing and we use it all the time.
Indy is spot on. Just to add, in the case of game art, if the model isn’t going to be deformed or is a low LoD object, simple decimation can get you 90% of the way to your desired result from your highpoly.
Also, I’ll double down on vouching for Z-Remesher. Even if you’re only using it from dyntopo to multires, for a bake, it’s a very useful tool. It builds a lot of spiral loops though, which can be problematic for finished geometry.
