Maya 2018 Retopology Tips: Speeding up Workflow + Symmetry In Tight Areas

Описание: My usual brand of quick and to the point tips for working with high poly models and impossibly close together areas. (Like inside of the mouth.)

Important point I forgot:
Turn off history! The more history you have on your retopology group, the longer it will take to do anything else. Rather than constantly deleting it, just turn it off altogether.

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::Additional tips::

1) If you need to cut your high poly mesh and are not planning to decimate at all or very far, always use Z-Brush to cut. lol Maya will just lock up even as low as 20k sometimes and wont let you edit the mesh.

However, just having 1.5 million polys sitting in the scene doing nothing but being a live surface in which you can poly snap to can be fine. 2+ million sitting there tends not to work so great.

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2) Most modelers just model toes and fingers spaced apart. For quadrupeds, ungulates, and creatures; feet-toe-extensions can't always be seamlessly fixed by rigging them back into a natural position.

So, creating poly groups for the toes and using poly group selection to isolate them can dramatically improve your ease of retopology instead of fighting between the toes. (Just be SUPER careful relaxing the edge flow, and turn of auto welding when you do. Even turned off, it likes to weld vertices in dumb ways.)

You will have to combine the retopologized toes back into the main mesh, and sometimes automatically welding is a bad idea. Manually snapping the vertices together may work better.

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3) If something wasn't welded it will show up very easily when you begin making the real UV map.

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4) A good way to check if you have topology problems is to import the model into Mudbox. It will loose it's crap every time something is the slightest bit wrong and put red dots all up in your stuff to point it out. THERE. THERE. AND THERE. YOU FAILED.

It's trying to be helpful, I promise. lol

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5.) If you can't figure out how to combine the last bit of edge flow (like in my case, the ears into neck) with it split in half, just wait until you merge it all together and do that specific spot last with symmetry on to tie it altogether.