Hard Surface Model Retopology related question

I made many holes in my hard surface model.

Should i overlap the plane above these holes?

Will the normal maps automatically make the holes in the low poly mesh if i overlap?

Pls answer

In this case yes, but they won’t look as deep.

If the holes are not present in the low poly mesh, and the one in the high poly are “real” holes (without being capped) you’ll get baking errors, even if they are capped, you need to have more geometry to correct skewing or a system that let you correct them with skew map. In general the hole won’t be very deep anyway.

Read these:

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking

So what should I do?

Close the holes on the high poly model?

Can i not retopologize the holes?

That too would work.

This type of topology is being made.What should i do?

Is it good for baking normals?

I doubt, it doesn’t match the high poly mesh, speaking of which, has really bad topology to begin with, so you won’t get good results anyway.

Post some wireframes or the model itself.

There are no wireframes for the high poly model, also, don’t show the two models at the same time, the topology for the low poly compenetrates the high poly version.

That mostly depends if there is a reason behind making low poly geometry for this hole.
If this is an important part of the mesh, close to player eyes, then making it on geo would give a better feeling and depth, but if this is some hiden piece of object, bake it on flat.

This just a question for the Guru’s out there…but in a case like this would it be better to apply the modifiers before trying to retopo…as from what I see the retopo is not snapping to the modified mesh, giving what looks like beveled retopo on areas that should be flat. I refer you to the last wireframe view.

Did you quote the correct reply? :smiley:

It all depends on the purpose of the mesh, yes, for this particular model I would use the “mid poly” (with real bevels) as the in-game mesh, it will be faster to make and lighter on the GPU in the end.

Before starting the retopo process, the mesh needs to be in its final form, or when you’ll try to bake the model informations, they’ll not match the low poly geometry. For a hard surface object like this, I would just collapse some edges, instead of rebuilding the whole thing with wonky edges.

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Ahh! :smiley: No, I wanted quote @kaspersky1

Before you spending more time, i would advise you to have a look on the highpoly topology first. As for the one shown, it will end in a very bad normal map. For the retopo i would start with a cube, instead of creating loops like on a organic mesh. You have a lot of faces on flat areas that will not surve any purpose on the final lowpoly, even with the normal map applied. Dissolve all that flat areas and create the loops where they are nessecary for the shape and details.

At this stage, you already have a few problems with the highpoly and the lowpoly topology will contribute them further to the end result. Also try to turn off your subdiv visibility when creating the highpoly or set it to 1, as you can focus more on the correct shape.

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Hard_Surface_Thing_kaspersky1_001.blend (1.2 MB)

I’ve reproduced your mesh (not 100% precise) with proper SubD modeling, you can use that to study the topology, build a low poly version for baking, disassemble it, everything you want.

As @Xortag said, with that kind of high poly mesh you are only going to make it more difficult to figure out why the bake is wrong.

Sir so many people use maya’s smooth preview for hard surface modelling.I have also done that.Don’t they find it difficult to retopoloize?