Retopology & Particles

I made this a while back as a starter project in Blender.


It’s a fairly high resolution mesh, and I’m about to retopologize it (partly to acquire the skill as well). My question is how should I best handle the particle system (the hair)?

I feel like I “kinda sorta” need the complexity/faces to do that part well, but don’t want to make a mess of a low-poly model (would like to animate it). I’m not even sure about how to transfer the particle system to the retopologized model. Would I just disable it, and can it be transferred over in a not-so-painful way?

Okay first of all you don’t need

a fairly high resolution mesh
for that model. First thing first learn the basic of modeling, then you will worry about other stuff (like hairs, particle)
How getting that model? Did you sculpt it? Or did poly modeling?

Here is David Ward free modeling series tutorial just to get you started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc5q_NvYVvs&list=PL581EEDEDA386890E

Cool, thanks for the suggestions. To answer, this model was made with poly modeling. I’m not too concerned with going super low poly on it, I just want to be able to rig & animate with a wide range of motion and not make a mess in the process :-P. It could even be rendered frames like sprites, but I can’t get the weight painting right with all the polygons in there now.

Can see your model in wire frame?

Sure if ya want.


It was just tedious manual poly modeling then subsurf. I learned the hard way (another thread months back) that you don’t want to apply that if you plan to animate :-D…but it’s good practice anyway…and plus, I can focus on the best geometry and not worry about the shape at the same time.

If you modeled this way, especially with such a simple model, you shouldn’t need to retopologise as your base topology before subsurf should be clean enough to animate. When people retopologise, it’s generally from sculpts/high detail modelling where the detail from those high resolution models can be baked to texture maps for displacement/bump etc. and a lower resolution model can be used for animation, with subdivision and displacement applied at render time.

Your model is not high detail, and retopologising it would be going backwards over a process you have already done for no reason. If you were to take your model and sculpt fine details onto it then retopologising becomes a more viable part of the workflow. So if you want to practice the process I would recommend something like this.

In terms of transferring the particle system. You can transfer the particle settings, but not the vertex group. so you will need to re-assign the vertices on the retopologised model on which the hair will grow with weight paint.

Yeah ordinarily, but like I said above, I learned the hard way that it’s a bad idea to apply the subsurf modifier. I don’t have a more basic mesh because of that mistake, so this is serving as a teachable moment for me hehe :stuck_out_tongue:

A possible way to get back if you made the mistake of applying the subsurf modifier and you have no back up of before doing it, is to use the Decimate modifier with the “UnSubdivide” setting, change the iteration to 2 or 4 (1 or 3 would create losange grid, not what you want in that case), and see if you can get back to your non-subsurfed model.
Note that at 4 or above, the “Unsubdivide” setting may fail to keep the quads and create some triangles, but at 2 it should work.

L I B. Make that 2 teachable moments :-P. Thanks Sanctuary, that worked quite well:


So on that note, does that look like a good poly density to rig & animate? One thing I had particular trouble with before (with too many polys) was trying to animate those arms so they could go completely above the creature’s head (those of you who recognize the inspiration will have a clear image of this hehe), as well as all the way down to his feet, but without making a wreck of those shoulders.

Usually the higher the polycount is the more painful it is to try to animate, so it’s always a good idea to animate a low poly and use a subsurf modifier on it (without applying , to avoid problems) if you want to render the animation.