Retopology in 3DS Max [Tutorial]

hello my name is Tim Ramesh and in this tutorial I want to show you the workflow I use to make a low poly version by doing read apology in 3ds max with the with the ribbon tool and for this tutorial I'm using 3ds max 2017 this will also work in future versions of 3ds Max and in a few other versions as well as long as the ribbon tool is in 3ds max this will work so the first thing I did was importing my high poly model from in this case ZBrush to trudys max exporting from ZBrush a 3ds max is something I might explain in a later tutorial but it's relatively simple if you used to ZBrush will export this as a FBX or obj and import it in 3ds max before exporting the tool from ZBrush to 3ds max I decimated the model so it has a lot less triangles and we'll hit the performance a little bit less so we're going to turn this sculpt in a useable low poly game asset and for that we need to reach apology this so the first thing we will do is we will grab a plane we can just drag this here we just need some basic geometry to start working with set this to 1 we just need one on polygon and position this close to the object you want to read apology read apologize so with that object selected we will turn this into a editable poly right-click and comfort editable poly and now we have the geometry we can work with next step is to open the ribbon tool you can click the topo ribbon tool in here by default it's on freeform for me but it might start here in in modeling so make sure to go to freeform first and here this is the toolbar we are going to use the most with the low poly plane selected we will turn this into a service because we want to snap the fur disease to a service and not to the grid so change this to drawing surface and now we will pick the high poly surface in this case their little armor piece and as you can see it's like that shoulder band the offset and I'll set that to 0.14 now we might change that later it's literally the offset of the vertices from the from the high poly object all right so now this plane and this shoulder pad are connected to read apologize this we're going to use the these three functions your step build extend and optimize and extend and optimize will be used use the most to get started let's open up the extent mode and extend mode we can extend the vertices and the edges to make some new geometry hover over a vertex and hold shift ctrl and alt to move my firt x around the surface so as you can see it snaps to the surface with an offset of 0.1 when you move the vertex so and as you can see now it is a little bit too close to the to the surface so as reposition gets a little bit and increase the offset to 0.5 that's better so we will the the low-poly will be used to bake the high poly details on to the low poly model so the low poly model must be pretty close to the high poly service cool so in the Excel mode you have several options while holding shift this one is one we are going to use a lot so while holding shift and dragging a an edge we can create a new new polygon here so and a reposition again with shift control and all cool so holding shift and dragging this out to create some new geometry and as you can see this is already pretty pretty fast and we will do the same this side let's reposition these a little bit [Music] we can create a new one still I'm using I only using the the shift button for now let's go around this spiky shape [Music] like that there we go so now we have the next few options so control shift to drag an edge to ex in the entire loop of which T on which the ad resides self control shift and we can play entire loop that can be useful in some occasions but will not come to use it here ctrl + alt this one is pretty important for me and that is bridging so when you hold ctrl and alt you click and drag to the next polygon here might be a little bit better control alt click and drag and it will connect these two also works here for triangles so ctrl alt to fill in this triangle in this case just by holding nothing and click and drag you create this this new polygon here click and drag in this corner to create a new one like that again here holding ctrl and clicking remove remove vertices or polygons it's also important in this case we can control alt to fill this in again so it's important to note that when you create a polygon like this make sure you start in the corner between two and borders you want to start from because if we click here you will get well the algorithm will get some work connection purchases you maybe don't want so in this case if I want to fill in this object I start here and drag a line there in this case I can start here bring a line there hold shift again creating pulley to permanet holding nothing click and drag is to try to play around with that to create some geometry now as you can see there is no edge here that is because I started a polygon and I continued from the polygon next to it in this case we can go to optimize and optimize has a few nice functions the one I use the most is the control use control to drag between the vertices to connect them with the edges so I hover over this vertex hold ctrl click and drag so it creates a and edge here so this is important for stuff like this a polygon exists from two triangles as you can see here this is one polygon and it's one triangle here and there's one triangle here so two days max decides okay there is a line from this vertex to this vertex but so this line is always there although you don't see it directly there it is there because it exists from multiple triangles if you want to change that if you want to change the direction of the polygon we can use the optimized tool to connect it like this so as you can see in this case it's not good for the model because it sticks through but in some cases it might it might be better so for example here there's a square polygon but as you can see in the shading the line is from this point to that point and maybe look at this shape we want to connect it like this so we're not creating a polygon we are just rearranging the edge from from the polygon and again in the optimize mode just hold shift ctrl alt to move the vertices okay so the topology here is a mess right now so we're going to remove that and again here are all the options you can use between you with the optimize tool you can weld some together that it's really useful as well if you want to optimize this and hold shift and drag these to each other we can weld them together that's really powerful oh yeah you should just play around with that if you think hmm I can't control this to the full extent there's a big chance there is an option to do that within these three okay so let me show you the finished shoulder part I did the finished low poly I said let's delete the high poly one so this is not super low poly what I did is I traced the shapes of the spikes so you can see this back here and you see the spike here so let's see how many triangles this has let's go to statistics triangle count and show statistics in the active few apply that and now we can see that so it's 878 polygons almost 1600 triangles it is still a little bit high but this is fine for a high and more high-end games if you want to turn this into a really low poly acid I can show you that but before I do that I will explain a little bit about the step build mode which I'm personally not using a lot but can be really powerful in some occasions you can just click on the surface while selecting the step build to place these vertices around the on the surface and hold shift and drag to create a polygon out of that so again click click to set the vertex one by one and hold shift and drag to create a polygon so as you can see this can be really powerful but I personally prefer the x10 mode so let's let's remove that and read apologize this into a very low object let's go to extend we just need thee the general shape in this case so [Music] okay let's keep the edge to optimize make a triangle here [Music] fill in this shape here optimize shift and drag okay so it is possible to make even more low poly but then I think it's not that they're pretty anymore okay and extend to control also to connect these two and this is now let's do it like this [Music] there's a lot of planning involved actually in making the rate apology so you have to keep in mind what the end result is going to be what is the approximate pulley count you want to achieve what are some details you want in the in the low pulley so in this case I want this corner here but as you can see that turns into some triangles I'm not sure if I want those click and drag let's connect this by [Music] click and drag and then go to optimize and well these together okay [Music] [Music] that's been clewd the inside part as well [Music] [Music] we don't need a lot of polygons here on the inside because that will be on the characters shoulder [Music] okay so as you can see I'm always only working on one side of the on one side of the object because I'm going to mirror this to the other side because it's mainly symmetrical the design if the design isn't symmetrical obviously this is not going to work you need to do it manually then [Music] all right let's hide this this is a very low poly version of what we did [Music] okay let's align this Center up just going out of optimized mode let's hide this for a second let's select everything on the X x-axis there are multiple ways of doing this but the most easiest way is just to select this and scale them all to one line go to the move and move this to the zero by just right clicking these arrows there we go so now this is zero oh here is a good example of we want to flip the vertex there we go [Music] all right to mirror this the pivot needs to be in the center so in this case the pivot is offset here so let's reposition that so if we going to mirror this you can do that multiple ways again you can use this mirror tool as a copy and as you can see be it mirrors along the pivot and the pivot is incorrect so Mary Mary's it wrong and you can do this manually with an offset but it's not what you want and you can use the symmetry modifier that's here in the drop down menu symmetry also this is on the on the pivot and the normal of your pivot so in this case the mirror is positioned like that so everything is around this pivot so let's reset that first thing we can we will do is reset the xform so let's reset basically everything on on the model and render hit as is as you can see there isn't anything any changes but as you can see when we do the symmetry right now it is aligned on the correct axis so that's one of the bar set is reset okay so now let's go to the higher key tab and effective pivot only so now we can change the pivot without changing the position of the model we can just set this to zero zero zero and deselect that and if we go back to the modifier tab we can use the symmetry tool and now it is mirrored if you want to change something you go back to editable poly and you can click this to show the end results so in this case we can change one side and it mirrors it to the other side as well so it can come in really handy and if you're done with this you can collapse that and now this one object [Music] all right cliff so the next thing to do now we have a low poly model is to unwrap this low poly model export this to substance painter for example and start texturing this but that will be something for the next tutorial so I hope this was useful for you make sure to subscribe for more tutorials like this I'm planning a lot of mini tutorials for a substance painter 3ds Max and ZBrush so let me know in the comments if there are there is anything specific you'd like to know about this workflow and yeah see you next time thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Tim Remmers

Views: 126,451

Keywords: Zbrush, Pixologic, timelapse, Sculpting, games, how to make games, game art, twitch, streaming, live, how to make art for games, gaming, team reptile, lethal league, art, artist, 3D, 3D Art, cg, cgi, how to, speedsculpt, speed, dungeon, creative, streamer, game artist, how to make 3D models, 3dsmax, 3dstudiomax, autodesk, maya, tutorial, tutorials, learn, retopology, retopo, lowpoly, low poly, diy, game, 3dcoat, Ribbon, tools, efficient

Id: o8W4aMqiY68

Length: 29min 45sec (1785 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017