Please help me with retopology of hard surface model thank you so much

Support Modeling
1

Hello guys! I really hope you have a wonderful time blending here and there!

For me, it was all good until I reached the retopology part. I want to pose this robot and my topology is messy. Usually when it’s sculpted I use B surfaces and I draw polygons, but now those are hardusrfaces, how to clean them for rigging?

poor robot
poor robot613×793 300 KB

messy
messy1168×762 477 KB

Thank you very much for any help, any advice is welcome guys!!

2

Welcome! :vulcan_salute: You don’t need to retopologize hard surface models (unless they are really dense). Only meshes that deform, it is: bend, warp, stretch, compress etc. need retopologising. For robots only parts that would normally deform would be wires, tubes, areas covered with soft plastic etc, but most parts are just solid objects connected to each other and moving as solid objects. That’s why the most efficient way to rig a robot is not to use weights, but to separate each moving part into a separate object and parent each one of them into their corresponding bone with a bone parenting. That is because with weights each vertex needs to be calculated separately for deformations. But if a whole object is parented to a bone, only the location, rotation and scale of that whole object needs to be calculated. :+1:

(edit: Anyway, your robot seems to have a reasonable amount of vertices so you probably could use weight deformations anyway without too much performance issues. :+1: And if you were to export it into a game engine then you would probably want to use weights instead of bone parenting, but if you are planning to stay inside Blender then I believe it would be good practice to learn bone parenting with this model. :grin: )

3

Do you really need to retopologies it? With it being a robot and made up of rigid parts I think it’s unnecessary unless you have some parts that bend.

4

Exactly what I was thinking, it’s a waste of memory and processing for such a thing.

5

image
image1168×762 148 KB

image
image1515×706 300 KB

You can try the Remesh modifier.
However, there is a problem with modeling because we use the Remesh modifier.

  1. Success rate is high only when separated into 1, 2, and 3 individual objects
  2. The bevel (B) applied to the object must be removed.
    If the bevel is not removed, there will be a problem with the corners.
  3. The object scale must be initialized for modifier use.

If it’s not that way, we need to model the topology in the traditional way.
You can find the Retology method on YouTube.