PROJECT 3: The devil named Retopo

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Off to one of my least favourite parts, retopology. Where are the clever robots when we need them? Even Elon doesn't like spending much time on it, judging by the complexity of the cyber truck (which I btw love, you go Elon), so I don't get why we still have to endure this torture in this day and age. 

For some of the assets, mainly the organic ones, I used a combination of ZRemesher and hand retopo-ing. I found ZRemesher provided great results on wider areas, not so great results on pointier or more detailed areas (even when trying to retopo with polygrouping, ZRemesh guides, topology brush and other thousand "shortcuts" I looked into before giving up and, defeated, coming back to my eternal frenemy 3dsMax).

Beginning of my bird retopo -> blue is Zremesh, rest is by hand.
Final retopo
















For other assets, I already had a pretty solid basemesh and in those cases, it became mostly about adding loops and conforming to topology. I constantly tried to keep in mind my budget, which was (according to the SoT brief, 2000-4000 verts per object). 


Overall, I had no major issues with retopo as the assets weren't super complex (apart from the fact that it was a boring process). I "watched" a whole season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine while doing it so I can't complain THAT much anyway :D Though in retrospect I am realising, if my sculpting workflow was cleaner with some of the assets, such as the fish skull, I wouldn't have had to spend that much time on its retopo (I left a lot of stuff dynameshed, where I now think I should have Zremeshed, subdivided and sculpted over it again, well, I learned for the next time). 

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