Good Retopology - How do I know?

Hey guys,

right now I'm practicing retopology on one of my sculptures. The goal for me is to get a clean topology, all in quads and with as little geometry as necessary. (There is no dedicated purpose like animation or something similar, just practice.) I'm like halfway done with it, and I'm already heaving 6616 vertices, that's why I'm wondering if I'm going through this process correct or am I just goofing around.

Has somebody an idea how I can determine if I did my retopology correct?

Greetings,
tobles

  • silentheart00 replied

    Could you provide an example of what you're retopoing for context?  It really does vary on the object, but if you provide an example, maybe some guidelines can be offered.

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Yeah, it's impossible to say from numbers alone or any technical measurement because it depends heavily on the type of object, its silhouette, the amount of detail, etc. A screenshot or two would help us to say whether or not you're in the right ballpark for polycount. 

  • tobles replied

    Hey,



    Left side is the sculpt, Right side is the retopology (obviously :D)
    What I tried to do was to lay loops around the specific muscle areas to get most of the details from the sculpt to the retopology. This left me with some very dense geometry in certain parts of the model that I kind of carried with me to other areas. I'm not to sure if this is good or bad.
    For example:

    In this area I did an edge loop that needed a lot of vertices to get that curve right, which lead to this:

    I have no idea if this is an "allowed" amount of geometry or complete waste.

    Regards,
    tobles

  • tobles replied

    Please guys, don't give me hope and leave me hanging afterwards.

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Sorry for the wait, when I initially read your message I didn't think of anything helpful to say. 

    This left me with some very dense geometry in certain parts of the model that I kind of carried with me to other areas. I'm not to sure if this is good or bad.

    I wouldn't consider that good if your loops are going out to other areas, but it's not necessarily bad either.  If it's not making editing difficult and you're getting the shape that you want without stretching, twisting, or random lumpiness, then it's not a big deal. 

    I have no idea if this is an "allowed" amount of geometry or complete waste.

    The reason this is hard to answer is because there are no rules! Haha, it's modeling anarchy out there. Is it a waste? Only if you don't need that much detail. To my eyes it does seem overkill, but if it's needed to define all the features that you want then it's fine. In general though, beginners (and myself to this day) tend to overcomplicate models, so I think it would be a worthwhile effort to simplify this model greatly and let subdiv do most of the work. 

    Here's an example from when I was testing out RetopoFlow:

    It's definitely not perfect, so you wouldn't want to follow it loop for loop, but in general that amount of density is as high as you would probably want to go. 

    Notice how it's just enough detail for the subdiv modifier to crisp up without drastically changing the shapes. 

    If you're just doing this for practice, I would recommend that amount of detail or even much less. 

    Hope that helps!

  • tobles replied

    Hi Jonathan,

    this defenetly helps out, thanks for your answer.
    Right now I'm thinking of finishing my retopology as high dense mesh. I want to try to use this as new "sculpt", bring in some more details and then I'll come to a second retopology where I will go more broad like what you recommended to me. I guess baking the normals to it willmake it a nice looking object.

    Regards,
    tobles