Week 13 - Retopology

 

Week 13 - Retopology

What Have I Learned This Week?

This week we learned about Retopology and its importance in the games industry.

When developing a model in high detail and poly count. This model is not optimised for actual practice due to its very high poly count. The aim is to create this same model with the detail but in a very lower topology to be more optimised for a game engine. This all begins with Retopologising the smooth high poly model.
 Retopology is rebuilding the high poly mesh with optimised geometry. The topology should be cleaner and primarily in quads with a few tris as exceptions and an overall lower polycount. In order to retop, you must have a live surface act upon. In Maya, retopology is done with the Quad Draw. Quad draw allows you to dot and create quads on a live surface, with easy manipulation of vertices to get the correct shape and size as well as edge flow. 

To first practise Quad Draw, I used my old red death smooth model to create a cleaner low poly model. Although it worked, the overall model was not practical so I used what I've learned to create a new smooth model.

This time I went with Crimson, another gun from Destiny 2 that has a similar design but much smaller. I divided the model into parts that I would create separate meshes for. These Divisions included the body, trigger, Knife and Cock. However, I should have also divided the handle and front of the body. This allowed much cleaner topology and edge low with fewer edge loops that allowed me to create bevels on all the hard surface edges.

Render 1 - Low Poly
Low Poly Wireframe
Smooth Render 1
Smooth Render 2
Smooth render 3
Smooth Wireframe


Because I tried to keep the topology of the original as low as possible, the retopology is not too different from the original in terms of polycount. Dividing the parts also helped make the retopology much easier to work on. Overall, I'm very happy with the new model and the retopology I achieved.




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