You mention several times how natural retopologizing becomes with practice, and it is very obvious that's true watching you work. I'm focusing on the silhouette and details for my initial face loops, however sometimes on complicated things like boots (where the whole thing is practically the silhouette) I run into the same issues over and over and I don't have a great way to "smooth" them out of the geometry into quads. So, the things I've run into that would be awesome if you had a method for:
1. A face loops ends in a triangle (I can chase it across my whole mesh, and it stays a triangle. I guess I need to add an edge loop somewhere to get rid of it, but this usually leaves me with a really dense mesh in one place)
2. Dissolving dense geometry (for surface details) into less dense, clean geometry as the mesh becomes more planar or simple. (I think I kind of stumbled on this double sided diamond quad that I "think" doubles or halves my face loop flow, for example)
3. I caught one of your 'rules of thumb' in the face retopology of Intro to Character Modeling that involved needing "6 verts and not 5". Can you go more into that and any other rules of thumb that pertain to retopo like that one?
Thanks so much!
Ryan