Hello,
I have not completed the full course yet. Can you please explain why you suggest doing a remesh to a "Medium Poly" version instead of doing a Retopology right away to your final Low Poly version? I am partway through the course and I'm not understanding yet. I have created game assets in the past (using substance painter while I had the free trial) and I've been very interested in looking into InstaMat as a replacement due not wanting to support Adobe. I chose a somewhat complex tech-mage staff to follow along with your course and because it has a lot of intricate parts I feel like doing remeshing AND retopology feels like a substantial increase in the time the workflow will take. Can I get away with just going directly to my final low poly retopology instead? I'd love to hear your thoughts and get an understanding of why you've chosen this workflow. Thank you, I've been really enjoying it.
Hi Jacob,
Disclaimer, I haven't seen this Course yet.
This will probably be explained further on, but there is a short Lessonin the Bake Course, that goes over using mid-poly: https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/baking-waves-with-mid-poly-meshes
Thank you for your replies. In this course the author does a simplified manual remeshing (See chapter three of this course) to create the Mid Poly for the UVs which feels a lot like a retopology flow but results in a higher poly count than the final low poly would, which sparked my question. Again I haven't gotten all the way to the final chapters so maybe he explains it more. I will keep watching, but the end segments does include a low poly retopology pass. It's not critical but I am hoping to be able to apply these lessons to my workflow which I'm using to make a game, and when dealing with a large number of detailed models (characters, armor sets and equipment) I am trying to build an efficient workflow since I'm a solo dev. I'll keep learning and working and all of this is just adding to my knowledge base and experience, so I want to understand the reason behind why people choose different workflows.
Hey there!
A very good question.
To make a long conversation shorter and consolidate what Martin and Omar have both mentioned here, you could totally go from high-poly directly to low-poly and it usually be fine! Doing an intermediary step of "mid-poly" can definitely feel like it's a lot more work for not that much of a payoff.
However, sometimes when making our low-poly, the overall fidelity of that model is, while perfect for games, far too low to appropriately capture the silhouette of the high-poly shape (the video that Martin had linked). One solution to this is a mid-poly model. After the high-poly, your retopology can be a little higher-poly so that it will better capture the details of the high-poly to bake from. Here, we can set up UVs and even use this to for texturing too.
Afterwards once all the textures have been created, back in Blender we can do the final "retopology" if you will, which would be us reducing our mid-poly down even further by dissolving edge loops to hit our poly-count goals.
Again, this can definitely seem like it's a lot more work sometimes for not that much more quality. I don't utilize this workflow for everything as well, sometimes a direct high-poly -> low-poly is enough! But for the times where your low-poly model is simply too low quality to properly bake data from your high-poly, a mid-poly model is the way to go!
If you haven't seen it yet, and when you have time I would highly recommend watching my BAKE course. It covers everything you need to know about texture baking, and has videos that go into details exactly what we are talking about here. In the meantime, I hope this explanation helps!
Chunck :)
Thank you Chunck, and thanks for getting back to me so fast!
That's a very clear answer and I really appreciate it. I'm starting to understand the value of the Mid-Poly and will definitely have to play around with different workflows some more. I will absolutely check out the BAKE course.
Thanks Again!