Complex mesh unwrapping

Hey!

Yesterday I’ve tried out sculptris and it was amazing, I’ve created a character and I’d love to make it game compatible. Now the problem is that it’s 360 000 verts and I need to unwrap it to bake normal maps then decimation (not retopo because it’s faster) but how the hell am I supposed to unwrap it? I’ve tried smart unwrap it took over 1 hour and blender still was not responding. Ideas are really appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Retopologise your mesh to create a lower poly base mesh you can unwrap. Either bake higher res detail with normal/displacement map or subdivide and project onto the original mesh to capture detail

I have to bake the normal maps onto an image but I can’t if the mesh isn’t unwrapped. What do you mean subdivide and “project”? I think there’s something I missed.

Sculpts are useless as game assets unless you know how to retopo and decimation is so inaccurate and needs so much work that saying it’s faster is not true for anything but the simplest geometry.
So retopologizing is necessary, like it or not. Once you have retopologized you can bake the sculpt’s normals onto the retopo’ed model’s normal map, which is easier to unwrap (because you retopo’ed for that exact purpose).

Yeah, Sculptris is fun and a bit smoother than Blender, but keeping your sculpting in Blender has so many benefits (multires, quad sculpting, etc) that Sculptris is just a toy - unless you have zbrush.

I’ve zBrush (pirate I am) but how to bake the maps without a UV? I’ve got no idea about this :smiley:

you only need a image/uv map on low poly for baking

Nice! As I’ve said I didn’t knew this, this is really useful, thank you. Does this work in any cycles baking build? :confused: