High Poly to Low Poly help need

Question Sculpting
Hi all,

I've been going through the Relic course and wanted to try an organic sculpture, like the Gem, of my own design as a practice.
I sculpted a simple "stylised dungeon brick" and retopologized it:


Edit mode view of the low poly:


Now that we had a good laugh at how bad the final result is, I would kindly request your guidance.

During the retopo, I was doing my best to follow techniques learned in the Relic course; Use snapping, shrink modifier, triangles and Quads are good etc.

Is there a step in the process I am missing? Is the retopo just this bad that the shape looks nothing like it? 

Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance


  • Hillerl. Lozano(Hillerlo) replied

    I'm new, but maybe in sculpt model with remesh tool and playing with diferent voxel size will work

  • Omar Domenech replied

    Well don't worry, you just need practice. In the beginning it's hard and nothing seems to work and we strive for a professional look, but we're not professionals yet. And that's the workflow, you watch a tutorial, you see a teacher doing it and you're like no problem, I can totally do this.... and then nothing seems to work for you. That is why the very best of ideas is, after you encounter the roadblock yourself, you watch the course again, because now you know where to fully place attention to. First time we watch a course we see it like a movie and we barely commit stuff to memory, but after you go hands on and see how hard it is and it's just that the teacher is pretty good at it because he has years of practice, that second viewing is when the real learning happens. 

  • Daniel Drews(BreadPigeon) replied

    Hi Omar,

    I appreciate the kind words.

    I've re-watched the tutorial left and back but unfortunately I've reached a point where I need some guidance. A pointer in the right direction.

    Any help is appreciated.

    Thank you

  • Omar Domenech replied

    Well, the first thing is that it's too high poly. You're wasting a lot of geometry in parts that don't need high poly details. Try outlining the contour of defining shapes first and then you fill in the rest. It's hard to explain by text, but that little crack or slash it has on the top, outlines the outer feature that define that shape and then you do the rest of the brick. That high frequency detail that is left you usually make it with a texture or normal map. 

    But the main point is, there's way too much vertices all around that are not needed. You need to simplify a lot. 

  • Daniel Drews(BreadPigeon) replied

    Thank you for your advice.

    I've reduced the number of vertices on the low poly mesh. The one thing I noticed is that when I go into object mode, there are black lines in the "crack" on top.

    Would that be normal? It feels like the low poly completely lost the original shape.



  • Omar Domenech replied

    If the second screenshot is the low poly retopo only, and the original one is not below it, meaning if those black lines come from just one mesh, the same retopo mesh, then yes, that seems to be a problem. I saw it and thought it's just the original poking through the low poly. That might be you have extra edges floating or duplicated vertices. Maybe a good old merge by distance could solve it. 

    Also with the retopo you are trying to get the defining features of the object, a silhouette of sorts, since all the detail is going to come from the bake, assuming that is what you're going for, like in Chunck's course. So the retopo'ed object is not going to look super the same. 

    You know, Kent goes through this workflow in the super mega course of the Collabs, the one with the Spice Vendor House:

    https://cgcookie.com/playlists/156-collab-02-2021