The Real Reason We Retopologize Our 3D Models

hey guys having a Morton here from flip normals in this episode we're going to be talking about why do you do read topology this is a question we actually got quite quite a lot recently we fairly recently released a new video on how to reproject from high res to alaura's which is something you just have to do a lot in a production but we've got a lot of questions asking why do you do this why do you read apologize Oh is something that we obviously just didn't think about yeah it's I mean we've just been doing that for so many years that we haven't even questioned I guess we've questioned it at some point but it's like it's just become such a normal part of everyday 3d life so we never really stopped up to think and explain why you actually do the thing that you do so why you read fold is actually fantastic question and I'm sure they're a bunch of people watching who's read apologizing they're like don't really know why I do it but my teacher told me yeah so let's read apologize so let's talk a little bit about it we um we have a character here so we have we have a series which covers how to sculpt this guy and we have a series on how to - coming out soon on how to actually read over this entire character and in the last video we did we showed how to reproject from this on to this and let's just talk briefly it's going back to basics here let's talk about why you actually do this obviously this is a lot cleaner than this in terms of apology but why do you need clean topology and truth is this really just depends on what you're using this for it's kind of like if if you if you if you were to model a car in the real world if the cars is going to be static on a road show do you need an engine in it I mean it's just a visual thing if this here is purely gonna be a statue or a 3d print or whatever yeah this here is perfectly fine because it doesn't actually have to do anything this is gonna be static the problem comes if you need performance out of it if this little car is gonna drive or this guy here is actually gonna move yeah so if you are doing anything where he actually has to deform you you need Rita palsy you need proper topology for them this is less you want to rig this character here and you are you want to take the arms up here all this that's gonna be most ghetto pretend here you going to take rotate tool and disable that and then let's do this so you can see here now we can technically rotate this mmm but this is because ZBrush has magic magic has really really good performance compared to a conventional 3d tool yeah so you're looking in this and be like well this with this performed pretty well no problem at all but you're not gonna be reading this or animating this in ZBrush know you can do something max blender Maya whatever it is yeah and another 3d software like so see brush is so specialized that all it really deals with on the canvas is polygons in something like Maya for examples for example there's so much stuff going on in the background that you know performance from a perspective of just having having a lot of polygons in the scene that that's really it's not very efficient no so being able to read to pologize something and decreasing the level helps your performance massively absolutely so basically what you're doing is when you are going to be animating this you are and rendering this you are using something like a Rita polkas mesh here and then all the high-res details from this here will go through in terms of with the displacement map or with a normal map no or a bump map whatever you want to do in film this will probably be done with your displacement map in games a normal map just depends on the requirements and this means that you cannot have the low the incredibly low res cage or base here which you can do all kind of crazy stuff with really good performance yeah and still get all the nice details from this here yeah usually usually what you would have is you have the low one the super low res body there which is the one that the animators will use then that body gets well then there would be a higher risk maybe like a render mesh or something that's subdivided a couple times that would then be wrapped - something like that yeah that would then be wrapped to the actual animation body and the animation body wouldn't drive this render body which at render time would then get subdivided further and then have a displacement map applied to it because it's actually it's actually something that we struggle with a lot when we hand stuff off to animators even though it's a big VFX production they still need good performance in the viewport ideally real-time ideally real-time because when you're animating you don't want something that's super choppy or anything so sometimes we even make specialized meshes that are even further sort of like go even more low res than what we've read apologize just to get more performance or better performance for the animators because they have a lot of stuff in their scene they might have buildings something that represents some destruction maybe they'll have some effects or something on some 2d cards or something so they can better assess what the scene is gonna look like so the more performance or the better performance the animator has the the better the result will get this is this is so important when you're working in any kind of production you're not just working solo no if you were to deliver something like this to your regular would be like the hell is wrong with you yes this I was once in a room and when the studios animator and a rigger the animator was just walking around through rigor or just shouting real-time why isn't my rig real-time with him and he left so it all ties together here yeah in order for the animator to have real-time performance they need a nice clean base here which looks like something like this super low res and they need this veneer is rap to it or with the displace map mm-hmm and it has to just be efficient also when it comes to selecting this as well and when we're doing when we're selecting here we can select stuff based Interpol's you can do the pole you mask in here and we have really nice and clean ways of selecting stuff yeah you can just drag here and you can just go that was easy and you see these get this like nice little formation here for the bicep you might necessarily want that but at least you can easily control it mm-hmm when I dealing with this kind of stuff in front do the same thing it's gonna be a bit all over the place maybe it's gonna work maybe it's not yeah it's just a pain in the ass really yeah and then you're doing this use everything breaks and and yes you could spend time on softening your masks and making them perfect but if you just had a low res version of this you could go and pose it go back up to your high res and as it's really another it's a good point for 4c brush as well where yes you can't just be sculpting on a super high res mesh but performance is also gonna be like even in in ZBrush we have this cycle to what is 200,000 300,000 points it's still not super fast you know when you're moving stuff around and and modifying things so having something that's low res that you've read apologize whether you actually if you've read apologized it manually like if we show the wireframe of the lowest body here you can see that the face where you would have a lot of detail is actually maybe like double the resolution of the rest of the body and that's probably what you would go for so when you subdivided it you need less subdivisions to get more detail in the face compared to the rest of the body and the rest of the body would probably not have as much detail in the face as the face anyway so there's a lot of benefits to to read apologizing especially doing manual read topology as well yeah we'll talk about a bit about sear meshing which is ought to alter topology versus manual repulsion a little bit here let's just go into Maya where we can actually show exactly what we're talking about here let's and we have the high res here and this isn't even that high res this is run like we said in super start from two hundred seventy thousand yeah this is all really decimated heavily the original mesh here is run 3 million Polly's can barely bring that into my are you ganna have it there but and you wouldn't like in a production environment you would never render a decimated model no so the at render time when when you start to subdivide your model like it's the render version that's already been subdivided once or twice maybe a little subdivide it another two times and then you end up with a couple million polygons so just for just it just for you to be able to for it to be able to support the displacement map yeah it's pretty crazy yeah so if when you're working in the production which is honestly when you'll need we baldie at least bespoke topology by hand the only thing a rig is really doing is just moving points you're essentially saying that if you want to move the leg you just wanna move the leg over from here to here you're not adding new points or not doing anything you're simply transforming the points which are here so let's try to do that let's select these points here no they're already selected I was lucky and let's try to move them and this is not your video lagging real-time performance right this here is and this is only selecting like maybe if these thousand Poly's of verts right here if you try to select the entire thing here and you do that not gonna do that cuz make my crashes don't trust this video in my crash but already here just transform the foot here is incredibly slow yeah if you were to enable soft select as well it'll be even slower let's try the same where the loris maybe you're gonna guess what's gonna happen now selected Oh this was this was strangely real-time mmm so now you can just take your foot and he can like just move around you know like you would with a foot yeah professional animator handing something so now you can also do soft select into all this kind of stuff here and this is gonna work perfectly fine with the entire thing as well you can just select the entire thing here take this off select and go show some really nice animation here for those who don't know this is not how you animate by the way it's for those who don't know this is how yeah this is that you would actually rig this but regardless of so yeah you put him you put it some some bones here and you would you'll probably paint weights for this but the principle is the same though you don't have a pivot and then you would have like a selection fall-off yeah and then you would basically do this just know like this yeah but you can do this you have incredible performance and you can select stuff you can really easily select you want to select just a portion around here you can super easily do that and really have fine control over it one thing you're going to do is a lot as well is what you're going to do most likely face shapes this is where you really need to make the eyes blink or really push the nasolabial fold up here so you might say this region here and just push something like this you want to really just kind of pull these kind of different things around him which this is also not how you do it but you can at least now you can make a blend shape of this and you can really make a specific expression if you really want like a pinch down here you can we can just get in here properly and just pinch stuff together and get really tight performance yeah again if we look at the high res here and trust me like having a high risk model where you do they shave just as a painting yes even what I've done before is is even so that there's like I have two meshes for for doing phase shapes there's the reach apologized version which is just the lowest one then one that's subdivided and the subdivided version would be our actual face shapes so we use the low res one and we wrap the high res one to it so whenever we move anything on the low res that moves on the high risk and then afterwards you go in on the high res and we would like refine it even more there's a little bit of a ya struggle but that's that that's what's this why you need good topology as well yeah because like so with with good facial topology when you're doing face shapes that's it's the most crucial thing for facials because the loops that use loops on a face are not random or accidental they all each loop serves a purpose and that is to be able to deform in the most natural way possible so if you lay down your loops in a way that doesn't make sense anatomically then the deformation that you're gonna get out of it is also gonna look wrong like if you're not you you can't have so with the rest of the body right you can do you use Sims on like the biceps the form the legs whenever stuff pins you're gonna jiggle that kind of stuff yeah but you don't do that for face shapes that all that's all done by hand yes sure we have shot sculpting to go in and fix things for the arms and the body when they move and occasionally shot sculpting for facials which is terrible terms you don't want to do that you can you can so having proper topology for for a face for face shapes is is just paramount yeah you you in the future we can probably submit total weight today you account yeah yes so you really you really just got to make sure that your loops around here and everything nice it is great then you can really control everything which brings us to see your mission let's do a quick sear measure off of this guy here and you do that under geometry and the sear measure and that's just you a quick sear much rear so now the serum ester has been done and as you probably guess this here took a lot less time and painfully make the de followed you here by hand and if you're just looking at this you might be like huh this is actually really good like it conforms around the muscles here and gives you really nice to polled you all around these kind of things here and yeah that's true it looks like it yeah but if you were to actually use this you will probably see that there are bunch of issues here this is what I'm seeing right away that first off it's not you want to loop going all over my cross here this is gonna be a real painting ass if you started mirror stuff but but also in general this here is most not likely not going to give you all the control you have particularly for areas like the eyes here compared this to that hmm you really just need the loops around the eyes at least if you're doing with topology or if you need proper topology like we said if you're just doing this for like a quick concept or like a statue or that whatever 3d print then this is totally fine and just projected back but you really want good to pose you around something like the mouth and here this here will cause issues give this here to your rigger and he would like slap you and this is this is one of the main issues with using serum measure for production when you want to do anything getting a little off track here but there are so many issues that need to be fixed in this in order to make it production ready that most the time you just end up wasting the time they could have been spent just using just doing proper topology so now you might be thinking well I can just delete this region around here and rest we do do that by hand yep but you can also just do it all by hand yeah then that way you don't have to connect everything anything up here because what you're gonna watch gonna realize pretty quickly once you're doing this is when you start connecting the stuff here up you're like oh okay but this star here is also a bit nasty all right there yeah I'm gonna delete that I'm probably gonna delete this entire region here and then you're ending up literally deleting this entire face here maybe you can use the ear the ear since we're doing all right and plus is an ear I don't care okay but you're gonna have tons of these things here what you're gonna have to fix by hand yeah and by trying to fix this by hand you are gonna spend far more time and if you're just doing this probably but I mean from a few from a purely projection perspective this is this is fine yes you know there might be some areas like the centerline there that you just need to go in and fix but just from purely projection this is actually really good because see remeasure has this amazing ability to make everything very even like the quads are pretty even sometimes there'll be stuff that's more elongated where it struggles but most of the time see remeasure is excellent for pure reproduction purposes and like any that if you just sculpting in ZBrush you just want to make statues or just want to sculpt then I think like serum is just fine because everything we protect it's just perfectly yeah the way I like to think about this is there aren't really any rules in Sidi there are like suggestions and when in this case here if you if you want to do this and you want to do this for for a production you can we strongly suggest you not to yes you are going to have issues with it and most likely gonna spend more trying time trying to fix it then you would buy but just doing it properly so I mean that's basically why you do read apology in general and when you do proper by hand mmm so the reason is really you get good performance and you can really control everything you can really control all little wrinkles here and get all the nice shapes into it yeah which is which is super nice one little quick thing I realized one are in here this is just a super nice little little pro tip for you all if you if you have a really high res mesh here like so and it goes crazy like this you can go to show and selection highlighting mmm and now you can it's still selected but you just can't see it you just can't see it so now this means that you can actually see the shape of it because right now it's it's basically impossible to see the shape from the anything here just unrelated low tip thrill so we do have as we do have upcoming series now in a few days which is will cover how to do this entire have to do this entire topology here from start to finish showing everything showing the rear projection and showing you how to get a proper model at the end so unless you've ease and everything I series and everything damn damn that's such a good tutorial but yeah we just wanted to show you why we topology is actually a useful thing yep so yeah we've really hope this here helped you guys hmm if you want more content like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 103,572

Rating: 4.9603591 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: Wa9gDxsP8h0

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018