Retopologizing Meshes in Maya

What you'll learn

In this course, we will cover a workflow for building geometry to better receive high resolution detail. Sculpting high resolution detail into our models has become common practice. To get the high resolution detail out of our particular sculpting package and onto more reasonably detailed meshes requires the use of normal or displacement maps. But the topology that we use to sculpt these meshes isn't always the best when creating our final asset. In this course, we will learn how to redefine the topology on a low resolution mesh so that it better matches the shape of the high resolution version. Using our high resolution mesh as a template, we'll use a variety of polygon modeling tools to redraw our geometry into a more useable form. We'll layout the UVs and finally we'll use Transfer Maps to get the detail from our high resolution geometry to our base mesh. Upon completion, you'll be able to optimize your own models in preparation for adding normal maps. Software required: Maya.

Table of contents