Retopology - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 103

Figure 7-13: Replacing some areas of the sculpt with new, cleaner geometry. Here, cubes are placed by hand and subdivided a
couple of times before being connected to the retopologized geometry.

trying to keep the size and distribution of polygons
even. To smooth out any dents in the surface, you
should select an area you've already retopologized—
avoiding edges and corners—and use the Smooth
tool a few times to even out the distribution of
geometr y.
For some parts of the sculpt, I wanted to replace
the rough forms sculpted freehand with more pre-
cise geometry. To do this, I simply added a primitive,
such as a cube or cylinder with approximately the
right shape, and moved it into place. For example,
in Figure 7-13, I added cubes to form the sockets
for the legs, deleting their front and bottom faces
and subdividing them to give the right shape while
adjusting the surrounding geometry to fit them in.

To further refine the model, I added support
loops around its main hard edges (see Figure 7-14).
You can do this using tools like Loop Cut ( ctrl -R),
Subdivide ( W 4 Subdivide ), and Edge Slide ( ctrl -E 4
Edge Slide ), or you can use the Inset Faces opera-
tor, which adds an edge loop around the selected
faces with a constant thickness. Combining these
operators lets you build up support loops around
the key hard edges of your model.
You can add embellishments to the retopolo-
gized mesh in several ways. For example, the piece
on the left in Figure 7-15 was created by duplicating
( shift -D) some of the faces of the retopologized
mesh in Edit mode and moving them up (with
snapping turned off) to create a new piece. Then,
by extruding the new part
to give it some thickness
and adding some support
loops around the edges, I
created a raised area on the
surface of the model. The
circular element on the head
in Figure 7-15 was made by
creating a new circle, pro-
jecting the circle onto the
surface of the model with
Blender's Snapping tools, and
then turning off snapping
and extruding out to create a
raised area. To flatten the top
of it, I scaled the central part
along its normals by chang-
ing the transform orientation
for the 3D manipulator widget

Figure 7-14: Using support loops to tighten the shape of the retopologized sculpt