Hard Surface Retopo

[Grimmy]

Hi, I've been playing with the new (Beta) hard surface auto retopo tools but I can't seem to get a decent mesh. However, I recently found that if I just export my voxel object to obj file I can choose my desired poly count and hey presto the mesh is low enough poly to put in a game AND the surfaces are followed correctly. My question is, why shouldn't I use the export to obj function instead of the hard surface autotopo?

 

First pic is of an object exported as an obj.(to 7500 polys) - Looks good to me. I could use that in a game

 

Second pic is using the hard surface retopo tool with default settings.(to 12000 polys) - It took longer and gave me a pretty useless result.

 

Maybe I'm missing something?

 

Cheers

 

 

 

[AbnRanger]

Sounds good. Yeah, the Auto-Retopo really isn't the ideal tool to use for some purposes. It's focused on providing an even distribution of polygons and thus it's not good for game output. It would require some cleanup work, even if it looked good overall. What is somewhat surprising to me is that Auto-Retopo seemed to prefer hard surface type objects before Andrew revisited the toolset, recently. But now, it seems to work pretty darned good on organic objects. No so dandy on Hard Surface. I always found Auto Retopo to be best used on secondary objects, like rings, buttons, rivets, belts, belt buckles, bracelets, etc....but not really the best tool for animated characters and game models.

[alvordr]

This is why I manually retopo my own work.  I could use the autotopo, but often it simply doesn't produce desirable results, either for baking or low enough poly count with acceptable edgeflow, etc.  If you want just static models, then it's pretty simple to do you're own mesh.  Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fast for what you have there.  For animation, as AbnRanger points out, there's more work to be done, as your edgelow, vert count and edge loops need more focus.

 

7K polys is pretty high for that model.  With manual retopo work, you could easily get it down to around 100-200 or so.

Edited December 31, 2013 by alvordr