Blender Guru has a podcast with Jonathan Williamson where that is addressed. (Ep68 31:00 to 42:00 Min.) He comments that sculpting programs have gotten so good that it’s pretty much replaced box modeling in the industry. And, of course Zbrush is working to make retopo automatic for all practical purposes. According to him they have almost accomplished that.
I fetched some of these podcasts and listened to them on my way to work. He has got some really interesting stuff. And the interview with Jonathan Williamson is a good one. CG Cookie offers a commercial plugin for retopo. What I tried was the traditional way with snapping and bSurfaces, where you can use the grease pencil for drawing edges. The latter worked quite well. There is also F2 for which a demonstration of how this an be used for retopo was on Blender Nation recently. Unfortunately this was only a timelapse with no explanation and guidance. But it was impressive.
You know what’s funny? Currently, if you perform a Google image search for “Kasperköpp”, you mostly get BA pages in the search results.
HaHaHa, James, did it myself now and that’s really funny
Speaking of large meshes, I had a question: what is the largest obj you’ve been able to import into Blender? I’m hoping to build a new PC within the next few months, and want to make sure it will be powerful enough to import raw scan data into Blender. I PM’d doris with the same question (since I knew she sculpted in ZBrush as well as Blender), but I haven’t heard back from her.
Hm, if ever I imported only small meshes, so their number of polygons don’t count. The biggest scene I ever used was the harbor with all characters in the scene. That have been 5,145,759 vertices. I have 16 GB of RAM on my machine and an AMD processor with eight cores at 4 GHz. The system is installed on an SSD drive, which makes the startup process and every disk IO super fast. Next time I would buy an Intel processor instead of AMD. While the AMD processor performs good I always found that Intel is faster when Blender builds the BVH. Maybe that’s because of some compiler optimization for the Intel instruction set.
but I think I will encourage you to do a very little animation once you have concluded the sculpting work.
Maybe with a little stage and some little curtains that open and close and some children in the audience clapping and enjoying themselves and…
Cheers, Shaun and thanks for your thoughts Such an animation would be nice and I myself played with the idea of having the heads talk to each other. But I simply don’t feel like making an animation with them.