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autopo/retopo work flow


benk
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I am struggling with an efficient use of retopo tools in 3DC and was hoping some of the experts on the forums can clarify.

 

In order to capture (bake) surface details in models sculpted in 3DC is it recommended to first sculpt the basic geometry in voxels, duplicate the voxel sculpt and convert to surface mode, sculpt details on surface mode object, retopo/autopo the voxel model and then apply and modify the retopo object on the surface model for baking? The reason I ask, is out of ignorance I have attempted to run autopo on surface models with spectacularly poor results and have noticed recently in the forums a recommendation to run autopo on voxel models instead of surface models. I have tried that workflow and have finally obtained a somewhat useful autopo result. It did take nearly 20 minutes to generate a 5k poly retopo object. Certainly faster than what I can do manually, but not nearly clean enough. Does the poly count of the voxel model affect the speed of autopo? In my test the voxel model had a 1.5 million poly count. I executed autopo with default settings which I believe would attempt to decimate model to 40k for autopo use. Is it best to reduce resolution of voxel object prior to initializing autopo process? Will this lead to a quicker autopo result?

 

Thanks for helping me toward a more efficient work flow and apologies if the these are redundant questions.

 

bk

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The Autopo routine still needs fine tuning, in my opinion, then it will be a more friendly and useful tool.

 

Here are the basic pointers.

Autopo in Voxel mode. The reason why is too much of a chance in surface mode to have hidden holes and mesh intersections as you are dealing with polygons in surface mode. 

These will cause the autopo routine just to crash 3DC, keep running or take a very longggggggggggg time to finish and the result is not good also.

Run Fill Voids (Voxtree tab) to remove any hidden holes in the mesh before running the autopo routine.

Clone the object and run smooth all a few times, to get rid of detail noise. This is covered in the first video. Once you get a clean retopo mesh, hide the cloned object or delete it and now bake to the paint room using the highest detail object.

Less quide strokes are better.

 

I could add more but posting video links instead.

 

Older video on Auto-retopo for organic but still good information. The autopo routine has been updated since then and the panel has changed.

Also there there are two on hard surface as well.

 

If possible share one of your meshes that you are having troubles with and let others see if they can get a good result and report back here to you.

 

Edited by digman
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Many thanks Tony and digman, and especially thanks to digman for posting the videos. I am sure it is maddening to continually answer these questions repeatedly and I am grateful for your patience. I will run a few models and report back on this thread.

 

bk

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