Quick RTFM question - retopologizing high detail models

[paulrus]

Can anyone point me to either a FAQ page, a page in the manual or post in the forums that covers retopologizing very detailed, very large, hard-surface models?

 

I don't normally build that sort of thing, but was recently asked to sculpt some very large, highly detailed spaceships.  They look great in 3DC, but now it's time to retopo and I'm not quite sure how to approach the task.

 

I'm sure this must have been covered previously, but my searches are coming up empty, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

 

Thanks,

 

Paul

[TimmyZDesign]

You can break your model up into smaller pieces and then retopo those pieces separately. Garagarape (a user on this forum) recently did retopo for a complex robot. You can see how he does it in his WIP thread (starting at post # 881) here:

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6720&page=45

[AbnRanger]

Can anyone point me to either a FAQ page, a page in the manual or post in the forums that covers retopologizing very detailed, very large, hard-surface models?

 

I don't normally build that sort of thing, but was recently asked to sculpt some very large, highly detailed spaceships.  They look great in 3DC, but now it's time to retopo and I'm not quite sure how to approach the task.

 

I'm sure this must have been covered previously, but my searches are coming up empty, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

 

Thanks,

 

Paul

Depending on what it's used for, you can use the Hide tool in the Sculpt room to separate out certain parts of a contiguous mesh (then invert the hidden part and work on those) and run Auto-retopo on the sections that are relatively primitive in shape. Things that are cylindrical/tubular or rectangle/square in shape, use the Strokes tool for those, as it is something of an auto retopo toolset in it's own right, and it does a clean job, too.

[paulrus]

Thanks guys.  My initial gut feeling was to chop it up first & then work on the topology, but since it's mostly a single solid shape I was having difficulty figuring out exactly how & where to make my cuts.  I really hadn't considered auto-retopo, but maybe I'll give it another chance.

 

Thanks!

 

Paul

[AbnRanger]

What you can do is create a degraded duplicate of the model, in the Sculpt Room, and remove all the small details that might otherwise make Auto-Retopo struggle a bit. Then, once you have the retopo mesh created, you could hide/delete the degraded voxel model > unhide the detailed one, and just tweak/modify/rebuild the mesh to conform to the details.

[paulrus]

Now that's a great idea!

 

The real fun is in trying to explain to the client why they can't use the spaceships right from 3DC.  Retopologizing might as well be a word in Chinese.  Thankfully they did know what a maquette was, so that did the trick.

[paulrus]

Funny thing.  I posted this thread back in 2015.  Now it's nearly 2024 and I came here ready to post the exact same question.  I use 3DC for mainly texturing and sometime UV mapping, but I rarely get to do a voxel model.  Now I've moved from production to teaching at a university and part of tenure is to do creative projects.  I decided to finally jump back into voxel sculpting and the first thing that came to my mind was - what do I do when I've created a huge, highly detailed sculpt?  I searched the forums, and the first thread is the one I posted.

I'm assuming nothing has changed in the workflow since my original post back in the day.

[Oleg Shapov]

1 hour ago, paulrus said:

I'm assuming nothing has changed in the workflow since my original post back in the day.

Hello! New tools have been added and auto retopology has been significantly improved. Show in the picture where the retopo needs to be done.