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anatomy. Additionally, the wings were initially
constructed and sculpted as separate pieces. Now,
I needed to create a final mesh with more detailed
topology that combines the two parts.
Selected Only
and
Apply Modifiers
options
are checked so that all modifiers are applied
(including Multires) and that the details of
your sculpt are preserved. This will create a
fairly huge
.obj
file that contains your high-poly
sculpted mesh.
Decimation
Before using retopology, I needed to deal with the
fact that the full sculpt was in the millions of poly-
gons and was getting unwieldy. Of course, this was
the reason for retopologizing it, but still, it would
be good to have a stand-in mesh that captures the
details with a lower polygon count for me to draw
my new topology over. The answer is decimation.
Decimation
is a process whereby a high-poly
mesh is automatically simplified by collapsing
small edges and polygons to reduce the model's
complexity while losing as little detail as possible.
Blender has a Decimate modifier, but it's a little
slow and not always effective, so I often use another
open source application called MeshLab (
http://
www.meshlab.sourceforge.net/
). To use MeshLab on a
Blender sculpt, take the following steps:
2.
To import your sculpt into MeshLab, just run
the program and then use
File
4
Import
to
import your mesh in
.obj
format.
3.
MeshLab has a huge array of options for pro-
cessing meshes, but for our purposes, we'll
use the Quadratic Edge Collapse Decimation
tool (
Filters
4
Remeshing
4
Quadratic Edge
Collapse Decimation
). This brings up a menu
allowing you to specify a target polycount
for your mesh, among other options (see
Figure 7-5).
4.
Set the target poly count to around 150,000
and turn on
Planar Simplification
in the
options. Then run the filter. After a short wait,
you should be presented with a much lower
polygon count version of your sculpt that still
encompasses much of the detail. You can export
this from MeshLab using the File menu and
then re-import it back into Blender.
1.
Export your object as a wavefront object (
.obj
)
file (
File
4
Export
), making sure that the
Figure 7-5: Decimating sculpts in MeshLab. The Quadratic Edge Collapse Decimation tool allows you to set a target poly count,
to which MeshLab will then reduce your mesh by merging close-together vertices.
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