Best Auto Retopology tool ever?

Reading through these posts I think so much of this frustration is about not properly understanding the processes involved in this sort of specialist modelling for animated character assets. You are taking this frustration out on the tools and developers very unfairly I think. There are real living people behind the development of these tools. No complex evolving software is ever going to be totally error free and informed feeback and bug reportring is an important part of the development process. But to me it is mostly looking here like blaming the tools when it is probably the workflow that is most at fault.

Auto topology systems are not a magic do all wand. They are just one tool in a bigger more complex modelling pipeline. If you have eyelids or mouth interiors in your sculpted starting mesh then auto topology is really not going to be the sensible best way to go about this. You need to combine it with other modelling methods too. A little bit of hand edited re topology too and a fair bit of old fashioned precision poly modelling.

The way I am seeing here by trying to get an auto topology system to do a thin sculpted mesh with holes for eyes and mouth is just not a good or optimal and sensible way. Better to covert the mesh to be retopologised into a solid voxelized whole and use that to get an auto topo shell to begin modelling the head asset from. If you want to use auto retopology then first optimise your starting mesh to get the best results. For a deforming character to be rigged you should always really start with a clean tidy topological shell for a face and extrude inward using basic poly modeling and editing tools for building eye sockets and an inner mouth cave.

Most of the more well known and used auto topolgy systems have made huge advances in the last few years. 3D Coat was the first app as far as I know to ever have offered auto re topology. This was the feature that I advised a games studio I was at during the time to adopt it. They used the auto retopology back in version 2.5 extensively then for environment elements.

For most organic forms these system are getting great now across the board and have become a huge time saver. It’s hard surface auto re topology which is the next big challenge to perfect. It might just help now to step back a bit and take some time to go through some advanced character modelling tutorials. I really think this would help a lot. Just take a breather for now and empty the mind a bit. You can’t offer clear feedback on the tools if you are not following an optimal workflow to begin with.

I hope this helps. All the best.

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