Retopology A Detailed Guide - What is Retopology & Why Do We Need It?

im about to retopo for the first time in my life. pray for me, im diving in

Why do we need retopology? when I was a young lad, I tried sculpting in blender for the first time. I turned on dyntopo because it made stuff look a lot smoother. I used texture brushes and kept going and going and going. Until finally i accidently switched to rendered view....and everything crashed cus of a million vertices

It’s the bane of my art. I adore sculpting, retopo hurts my heart 😔

Maybe because of the covid but i hear your voice everyday more than anyone else :) Really like your work and glad we have you.

I've never been listening to a theoretical lecture with this much interest and understanding before. I've leant so much thanks to this video <3

In the fourth pillar, you would get an even better deformation if you add a loop cut between the triangulated mesh at the back <=> (between the lines, the edge loop is stopped by the triangles). Really useful for realistic elbows, knees etc

WOW! man this is EXCELLENT! I know how to Retopologize in Blender but this is such an obscure topic that gets no attention and Blender makes it extra complicated because a lot of the tools are all over the place and difficult to find so most people just give up. IMO if you use something else and have no confidence in Blender, trust me once you figure it out is absolutely great 9/10 but you need to also use a bit of the sculpting tools such as smooth with options so it doesn't distort the overall shape. I used Maya's Quad Draw, TopoGun and 3D Coat and Blender works just as good, it just needs a complete rework on it's stools/options locations. There needs to be a Retopology workspace with everything easily visible. It also could also use more Retopo specific tools. Basically it's an interface problem. Thanks for this!

thanks so much for this. you covered A LOT, and very rarely did i feel intimidated by it, rather you helped me to feel that "getting good at it" was possible, and entirely probable. i'm taking this slow, and bite-sized, and it's working well. keep up the great work and great service you do for the community!!!

doing your character creation course and i am glad i can learn from you more for free on youtube .

I've been doing retopology for the past week without even knowing! I felt that all the assets i found online were although good, but they didn't have good topology and had excess topology which increased render times a lot! Using decimate modifier and then doing retopology and then finally adding a subdivision modifier will cut down your render times by a lot!

Something wasn't clicking with me previously with retopology but this video explained it quite well! Bravo!

Thank you Grant, don't know how I'd learn without your videos.

This is an insanely useful resource! Love these videos! Working through this tutorial set as I keep hitting brick walls with my modelling and I really need to stop being lazy and learn to retopo properly.

This is highly useful especially for beginners. Thank you

This is a very important thing to learn, great explanation, thanks Grant

Its important to note that for animation there is only so much you can do with retopo. Just try to keep every face the same size and do the Rest with skinning. but in film for example very often blend shapes are used.

Make sure you give your GPU a big smile and retopologize! 😁

Whoa, literally was about to search your channel for this exact thing...

The most important retopo video on the internet right here

Another important property of quads is that the industry-standard Catmull-Clark subdivision only has desirable properties on quads, it goes lumpy on triangles. There exists Loop subdivision surface, that is better-behaved on triangles (not loop as in a series of edges, but Loop as in Charles Loop), but in turn it doesn't perform well on quads. When quads are subdivided into triangles, they encode a particular bias direction into the mesh, which is not desirable and becomes visible in Loop subdivision. Both of these subdivision schemes were defined i think around late 70s or so. Decades later Loop returned i think with Loop-Stam subdivision which unifies them elegantly, but by that time, the whole industry locked in on Catmull-Clark subdivision due to overall advantages of quad modelling, and introducing any other subdivision scheme would impede interchange and make code sharing a problem, for example the modern GPU-accelerated Catmull-Clark code in Blender comes from Pixar (OpenSubdiv) and was open-sourced by them specifically in order to improve interchange.