Hi. Sorry, I made a recent topic about this but it lacked detail. So here I am making another topic/post with more information to the problem.
So I am making a realistic human mesh and here in the first picture illustrates the original mesh with no modifiers. This mesh was a free human mesh that I imported from somewhere.
I detailed his face through multiresolution using 2 subdivision counts to give him more facial definition to my liking. After that, I did apply the multiresolution, which means to me that I cannot revert back to the original faces and now I am stuck with more vertices/faces. I did this without planning ahead.
As soon as I get into sculpting the skin through multiresolution, the max subdivision counts I can go up to is 4, and not 6. I am following the human course tutorial which the instructor would go up to 6 counts without any crashing when baking certain textures. When I bake certain textures, it crashes real bad and I believe it's because this subdivided mesh I have right now is just too much by default. Like this many subdivisions is what I have for this new original mesh. I want to preserve the details of this new original mesh, so my goal was to re-import the original mesh and then transfer the new subdivided mesh onto the original through multiresolution 'reshape'. So I added multiresolution on the original mesh with 2 subdivision counts so that the number of vertices match with the new mesh.
It worked! Topology matches now. But...
... look at how clean the topology could possibly be now with the original mesh. I have the wireframe toggle on. Although, I am aware that the original mesh has a 2 subdivision counts in multiresolution - if I disable the multiresolution modifier - it will return back to its choppy mesh (which is the original yes). There is nothing wrong with that of course and I know this is the way Blender works - but now I'm wondering if there is a possible way I can do a retopo with the mesh being a lot cleaner with less faces - also retaining the facial features without having to start a new plane and adding faces over the mesh?
So my idea was maybe I can make a copy of the new subdivided mesh and then decimate it!
NOTE: I decimated with 4 counts, seeing if it would look like the same number of faces with the original mesh.
Although this would compromise some details - so maybe I can also do the same process where I can transfer the new subdivided mesh to this decimated mesh through multiresolution 'reshape' key.
Things always go funky after using the decimate modifier. The decimated mesh had multiresolution with 2 subdivision counts and it should've been matching the same number of faces as the subdivided mesh. Here's proof that it should've been the same.
Thank you for all of your help. I am still new to this site and I don't know how to reply to you guys. It seems that I can only read them. I hope this all makes sense, and I will re-edit my post if any more detail is lacking.
Ok so explain the problem a little bit more. Let me see if I understand correctly.
You downloaded a model and started working with it on sculpting, you added a multires modifier on level 2. After you had sculpted it, you applied the modifier, which resulted in a very very dense mesh. Now on top of that very dense mesh you again added a multires and this time it would only reach 4 levels, because may the base mesh was too dense. Now the real problem was that when you tried to bake textures, since the base mesh is too dense it would crash on you so now you can't move forward.
So you decided to transfer the sculpted detail to the original base mesh you had downloaded, because that one didn't have a level 2 multires applied and maybe the baking would go on fine in that one. So since you didn't want to loose all the sculpting work you did, you transferred the sculpting with the reshape function from the really high dense mesh to the original one and it worked fine. So now you have all the work you did in the original mesh that you could now bake textures in it. Right? That could be the end of it, did you try baking?
But then you thought hmmm, what if I can make it even better with less topology, let me add a decimate modifier an try to retopo on it. But with the decimate the face count doesn't match so now you can't transfer with the reshape. So that is a dead end, that wont work.
If you want to retopo, you don't have to decimate, you can do your retopology on top of whichever mesh, because you're going to get a clean new one either way.
Yes. I basically wanted to do a retopo to improve performance. Thank you for your answer.
Hi KT AnimationStudent ,
I am not an expert on the Decimate Modifier, but I would guess, that Subdividing Triangles (which automatically makes them into Quads) and then un-subdividing, might sometimes go wrong and your Original Mesh has a weird situation in the red rectangle:
That looks like an error, (maybe from Importing...two Vertices that were close got accidentally Merged?); there is absolutely no reason for those Triangles.
And I think those (perhaps among others) cause the Vertex count mismatch.
You can do a retopo for sure, just like Kent did on the course and that can be your new optimized mesh. But probably there is even no need since you got a good working mesh when you used the original again and transported your details to it. Try baking your textures with that one.