game-ready retopology part 2

In previous post I explained my approach to game-ready and animation-friendly retopology. Now the retopology is almost done - let's take a closer look. Below you see a Decimated Version of my Highpoly Sculpt (Decimated version allows us to open this high-poly sculpt in another 3D Software like Maya or Blender because decimation reduces polycount from 30 million polygons to 300k but also maintains all the necessary features for a successful and precise retopo.

A Decimated HighPoly Sculpt that we will use as a source for retopology process.

This is what decimation looks like with wireframe on

Decimated version is nowhere close to being used in a video game, because the polycount is crazy and will lag extremely at best. It's also impossible to create UV islands for texturing on this polycount. It's only suitable for something like 3D Printing because 3D printers don't really care about topology. But correct and clean topology is crucial for animation and UVs and shading. So I did the manual retopo in Maya and now it looks like this:

Now this is what a proper game-ready retopology looks like. This result is actually not super economical - it is around 35k polys in total, but 35K is absolutely fine for the most 3D Softwares and Game Engines.

For example some AAA games (Red Dead Redemption) may have around 100K per main character but smaller mobile games may have like 20k per character (League Of Legends Wild Rift) or even less than that.

Long story short - for my needs 35k if fine but I can always come back and reduce polycount if needed.

Now let's do a basic UV unwrap and see if my retopo looks good and I did all the UV seams in correct animation-friendly places.

As you can see the checker texture is clean.

Our main goal is basically having this checker texture look adequate without weird deformations. Seams and texture cuts are not too dangerous but super weird deformation of the checker texture may cause lot's of problems later on both on texturing, shading and animation phases.

Basically If I see a nice checker texture then it's a great sign that everything is working properly, but I still need a little pass on working with the UV islands which I will show in the next post.

If you are struggling with retopology and need a consultation feel free to reach out! See you soon!