>>40789Woo you picked a hard topic. Just reminded me I was working on a universal base mesh. It depends how high poly you want to go. All the advice I've seen is don't worry about polycounts so much. I'm not done with it yet. I just got down to starting to work on the feet and there's a lot of shit I should probably fix.
Basically the ideal is to keep everything a square grid, because that's how things divide. But you're going to need to create intersections where five squares meet sometimes. This is how edge loops are formed. Edge loops are nice to separate different areas on the mesh for sculpting as well.
So where do we need polygons? We need them in areas that deform especially like you said. But we also need them in an area that is going to be highly curved as well. You can use normal mapping to make the blocky polygons look rounded as they're supposed to from head on, think of normal maps like a hologram, but from silouhette, you need the polys unless you want a blocky curve.
This shit looks really high poly but it's only 27k tris right now. That's still pretty low.
No one really suggested this to me, so this may be a dumb idea, I'm trying out tris so I can split an edge into another edge loop so I can add more polys in places where I need it like da booba. I'm planning on using this as a universal base mesh so I definitely wanted more polys to be able to handle even large booba than this.
The part that just fucking pissed the hell out of me is doing the retopo on the under armpits. Also I don't know if my technique is good, but I'm using Houdini for this retopo and they have a smooth tool, and that's kind off how I've been informing my choices is, draw some polygons, hit smooth, see where they go, add more polys until they stay in regions where I need them. The armpits are fucking bastard. In general you want circular edge loops around circular areas, and you can see in that video, that's how he did the booba, but I was finding with my smoothing that was making everything concentrate to the center of the booba. so I instead went with the grid approach. I think that will work better for deformations as well.
You can see with the face and the mouth I went with a circular edge loop around the mouth and eyes.