I'm going through the process of retopologizing a sculpt via drawing contour quads around all the major muscles groups, then I realized there's this thing called "remesh". Why don't we use that? Is it really that impossible to just quickly turn a sculpt into a remeshed variant with the modifier and animate it so that you can skip retopologizing?
It can and can't. Remesh is designed to add more geometry for sculpting more details or to reduce geometry with a focus on sculpting afterwards. Because of this, the results may not be good for deformation/animation. So, depending on your end result you may have something that works or you may not. With that said, doing retopo is the best way to learn if a topology will work or not. Once you have that experience then look at automating the process. In my humble opinion.
And this is from a guy who would rather rig and weight paint than do modeling.
