I have so many questions about retopology that i am scared wont get answered and i am so close to quitting because after dozens of tutorials and a bunch of research i still cant seem to understand its purpose and weather or not i am doing it right. Is this necessary for animating? Why do some tutorials only have certain features of their modeled covered and other have the entire modeled covered?
How in the world do i retop a complex mesh???
I learned all the hot keys and work flow, there is still no way i am going to get into all the nooks and cranny’s like this.
can i skip this step and just animate?
What are the situations in which you can and can not skip this step??
When i am all set up to retop my vertexes will not go everywhere i need them too (if i even need them too idk), like inside the mouth for example, around the teeth.
This just seems like another way which i can screw up and ruin my entire project, i am already starting over from scratch because i couldn’t animate the last model.
The question if to retopo or not, I guess it comes down to performance and how it looks animated. For personal projects I’d say if it works, and looks ok, no need to retopo. Else, search for topology for animation.
The flipped normals YouTube channel has some good tutorials on the subject.
Topo is not only important for animation, but it is also about how subdiv works. You might have noticed, that meshes tend to deform badly at angles oblique to the edge loops. Yes, you can reduce the effect by adding more vertices (making the mesh finer), but low-poly modelling is easier with less vertices, so aligning edge loops with the ‘flow’ is better. Also non-quads and poles deform differently, which is only wanted at specific places.
Where you mostly don’t need it, is when you have static scenes of artificial objects. For tech devices or archviz there is less need, as you can work without the subdiv modifier.
Topo certainly is one of the more difficult skills. I guess the popularity of sculpting is a consequence of that also.
With ‘empty faces’ you probably mean loose geometry. It should be removed, as it influences the subdiv modifier and also smoothed normals (usually in undesired ways).
It’s apparently not impossible to do high-quality remeshing at least semi-automatically, and there are a few opensource tools available, but Blender is still lacking on integration it seems.
About the empty faces, it probably was a simply mistake during editing. But it doesn’t matter, as it can be easily fixed. Problem Cleanup->Merge by Distance is already sufficient.
I would see retopo as cleaning up a mesh, so it can be easier worked with, understood and is less ‘fragile’ to deformation. It something like cleaning up your desk, putting stuff you need in order and throwing away the rest
I cannot explain how the loose geometry got there, but likely is, it happened during editing. Maybe you tried to delete that mesh part or so, but deleted only the face. I would not worry about it. Just delete it and be done with.
