Retopo

In one line#

Build an efficient, animation-ready mesh over a dense sculpt. It is the step that turns something you made into something a game or a rig can use.

The layout#

Getting started#

Retopo opens on No reference mesh, import a mesh to start retopo. Bring one in from Sculpt with Send to, or Load from Library. Everything else is drawn over that reference.

What you do here#

Draw the topology by hand#

The Poly Pen is the default tool, and the workhorse: click to place vertices, and quads appear between them. Snap to Surface, on by default, keeps every new vertex on the reference mesh's skin instead of floating beside it.

The rest of the creation and editing tools cover strips, loops, circles, grids and the usual move/extend operations. Work in whichever selection mode fits: vertex, edge, face or island.

Or let it retopologise for you#

Remesh & surface, in the properties panel:

• Target faces: the budget you are aiming at.
• Adaptive (curvature): spend the budget where the shape is complex rather than evenly.
• Field extract (beta): flow-field-guided extraction.
• Auto Retopo: run it.
• Paint density / Clear density: brush where you want more or fewer polygons before running it, so the result is dense in the face and sparse in the back of the head.
• Strength, Offset and Shrinkwrap control how tightly the result hugs the reference.

Auto first, then hand-fix the loops that matter, is usually faster than either alone.

Symmetry#

X, Y and Z, with a threshold (0.0010 by default) that decides how close to the axis a vertex has to be to count as on it. Raise it if a mirrored edge loop is not being recognised.

Polygroups#

Named, coloured groups of faces. Assign selected to active group builds them up as you work. They are what later lets you isolate, hide and UV a region without selecting it again by hand.

Display#

Four toggles that decide what you are looking at: High poly (the reference), Retopo mesh (your new one), Wireframe, and Snap to surface. HP opacity fades the reference back so your topology reads clearly over it.

UVs#

The UV menu handles unwrapping and layout: the step that has to happen before Pigment can paint anything, because a texture needs somewhere to land.

The unwrap gate#

Retopo checks the mesh before it lets you unwrap, and answers in one of two sentences: "Ready to unwrap, no blocking issue." or "N blocking issue(s) fix before unwrapping."

Beside it sits the triangle count against your budget: 12 480 / 15 000 so the two questions a retopology has to answer, is it clean and is it small enough, are both on screen at once rather than discovered later in the pipeline.

The Normal Map Baker, in detail#

Baking transfers detail from the high-poly reference onto the retopo mesh's UVs. Four things decide whether it works:

Two warnings worth reading rather than clicking through:

⚠️ "No UVs, baking object-space normals. Unwrap first for standard maps." The bake still runs; what you get is object-space rather than tangent-space, which most engines will not use as-is. Unwrap first.

AO sampling is slower, twelve rays per texel. Ambient occlusion is not another checkbox at the same price; budget the time for it.

Files it reads and writes#

Sending work to other studios#

Produces a clean-topology mesh. Accepts high-poly and retopo meshes.

Downstream: Pigment to texture it, Render to light it, Engine to play with it.

Working with someone else#

Retopo syncs as a document, the whole state, debounced, plus a few granular operations (tool change, selection mode, settings). Two people editing the same mesh simultaneously will have one of them win; split the model between you instead.

Limits and common snags#

• Nothing to draw on means no reference mesh is loaded. Import one first.
• Vertices floating off the surface: Snap to Surface got turned off.
• Auto Retopo giving even density everywhere: turn on Adaptive (curvature), or paint density first.
• Symmetry ignoring a vertex near the axis: raise the threshold.