Toolkit 3D - Retopology in Blender

 Toolkit 3D - Retopology in Blender

Within Blender, there are two main ways to approach retopology. These are manual and automatic. Firstly, I looked at automatic. This is from an addon that can be used with Blender called QuadRemesher, which will automatically make our overall topology better.

Here I am using an example model. I have used the subdivision surface modifier to increase my poly count massively. The overall topology is good, but still, the poly count is now far too high. In a rigging workflow, where we are trying to create a game ready character, this would be a problem.
Going to the sidebar after selecting the object, we can then open Quad Remesher, and it opens this menu. Right now, our face count is near 400,000, which is not close to what I want, especially since it is only a base mesh. If we move this down to about 20,000 within the Quad Remesh menu, and press remesh, we get results.
This addon is great, and can massively improve a workflow by automating the retopology process. However, I want to understand the other two kinds of retopology, so I also did them.

Manual Retopology

For manual retopology, I start by creating a plane. this is going to be the base for creating the version of the mesh with the new topology. We then enable snapping at the top of the viewport, and enable Snap to Face, instead of the default which is snap to increment. This is so when we use the plan to do the retopology the plane will automatically snap to the mesh. We also enable Snap with Closest in the menu so that automatically snaps to the mesh. Finally, we enable project individual elements, and turn on Move, Rotate and Scale in the affect box.

To work much faster, we can also use the mirror modifier before beginning to create the topology, as it will mirror whatever we do on one side. Also remember to turn on clipping to make the middle clip together.

Now when we go into edit mode, we can move the plane to snap to the mesh below it. same with the vertices. We can use this to create the topology, extruding the edge whenever we want to create a new one.
Using this we can create a completely new mesh, using better topology. Manual will always be better than automatic even if more time consuming, due to us being able to manually choose how we want our topology to look.

Something important to mention is that topology should follow the edge flow of a model. The edge flow will always go in the direction of "landmarks" in the model, such as the forehead topology going down to match the direction, and the topology in the nose curving around it.

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