What's a good way to have low poly follow shape changes on the high-poly? (hard surface)

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I’m new to baking. If I make changes to the shape of the high-poly, is there some modifier or method to make it so that the low poly follows even though they have different mesh-data?

I’m doing hard-surface. The workflow I’m doing is that I first make the high poly, then merge stuff up and remove n-gons to make the low poly, and sometimes the shape changes on the low poly or vice-versa. If this workflow can be improved or changed let me know!

I don’t think shrinkwrap will work here, because it would deform the high poly too much (since it’s hard-surface), is there some way to make the high poly just “kind of” follow the low poly (or vice versa? if that’s better)

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Hi,

Personally, I don’t think that’s possible anyway. I mean, if you have a high poly model and you wanna make the low poly from it, that’s fine. If it comes to textures, you simply need to bake them, if it comes to a model, well, you can use so-called Decimate modifier in such cases. Here’s a good short YT tutorial on how to do this:

Yes, as you have just mentioned it up above, you can do this manually by switching to the Edit Mode and remove those unnecessary vertices and all that, but it’ll be much easier with Decimate modifier.

As for your main question - as I’ve just said at the beginning, I don’t think that’s possible, and that is very simple if you ask “why?”. That’s because when you make a low poly from a high poly, of course, your shape won’t look the same, because, the fewer polygons you have - the more triangles you’ll see at the end of the day. Simple as that.

Hope that helps

Cheers,
Sergey

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Non destructively?! - yes.

Although an approach that implements proprietary tools rather than FOSS which by the way has been around for a few years:

However in my opinion replicating a similar workflow in Blender, maybe Chipp Walters work on Kit OPS I think is worth keeping in mind:

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Hey thank you for the reply. I don’t think the decimate modifier will work in this case. It’s an armored torso that needs to deform in real-time (forgot to mention that…). Otherwise this would probably have worked out, so still helpful to keep in mind

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Exactly I want the process as non-destructive as possible. Right now I notice myself doing a lot of things that I feel could be automated or be done a lot easier. With the proboolean workflow I still end up with low-poly geometry that can’t deform well if I understand right. The kit-ops thing looks interesting, will probably try it out. I think maybe a good approach when dealing with an asset like this is to just forget about the low-poly until the very end. Perfect the high-poly > dissolve loops and retopo for low poly > bake to low poly > notice error and cry like painter in 16th hundred. As long as I don’t make major changes to the shape I won’t have to redo the dissolve process at least.

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ADDENDUM:
If this thread is about hard surface game ready asset generation?

Then your proxy or low poly is the most important mesh, simply because it will be seen/played ingame via your preferred engine.

i.e. best practices - Question about continuous meshes for low poly bakes.

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Yeah it is, sorry for being unclear. Right now I’m trying to have the high and low poly linked as much as possible, only altering topology on high poly through modifiers and stacking, and potentially unlinking right before bake to dissolve loops. Otherwise just keeping the topology sparse on the hp and using hacks to deal with poles for the bake.

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