Modeling - Going from HighRes to Lowres

[dustinbrown]

Once you have your high res sculpt and you're ready to model your low res geometry, do you guys usually start with a decimated mesh to get you half way there, and make refinements by removing and adding edges where necessary; or do you usually just start from scratch and retopo over the medium or high res?

[stutts]

I always start from scratch over me medium resolution mesh. I have never tried using a decimated mesh but it seems like the clean up from using a decimated mesh would be more work than starting from scratch

[Ritorian]

Ya i start from scratch or if my lowest levels are decent I'll start from those. Deciamated meshes would seem like a pain to clean up.

[dustinbrown]

Ok, thanks guys.

[BigJohn]

It depends on the type of model I'd say. If I'm doing sub-div work (usually for hard-surface stuff), then I find it easy to just remove the subdivisions and optimize the low-poly manually.

If it's something more organic, like a character, cloth/leather, or a piece of armor that's more organic-looking, then retopology is in order. That's when I'll decimate (purely for performance reasons) and import the mesh into something like Topogun and do retopology there.

[robinb]

I've used decimation on some small environment stuff where it's basically just a subdivided plane. There was still some clean up (it didn't preserve the boundaries and there were a fair few super thin tris that I had to get rid of), but it did save time over doing it from scratch.

But I wouldn't want to do it for characters as triangulated loop-less models are very difficult to work with. Optimising a model that's just a mess of triangles is a waste of time. I'd either start from the original base mesh, or maybe the first level subdivision model and remove loops or start from scratch there.