Retopology Techniques in Maya

What you'll learn

With the advent of the high-resolution sculpting workflow, the modeled assets we create can sometimes be difficult to work with in their native state. For this reason, various tools are typically used to create a new, pipeline-friendly topology for the model. There are different methods for creating this geometry and it's important that the method we use be quick, efficient and give us the control we require. In this tutorial, we'll cover the tools in Maya 2014 that make this retopology process go much faster. We'll cover setting up our reference model using the Modeling Toolkit. We'll talk about using Quad Draw to interactively place points and polygons across our model's surface. We'll also cover the Shrink Wrap functionality and talk about edge flow concerns as we create a new mesh for a character model. We'll finish up by looking at the UV process and baking out our color and normal maps to apply to our new, lower resolution mesh. In the end, you'll be able to create optimized meshes out of your own high-resolution sculpts. Software required: Maya 2014.