How to Retopologize the Body in Maya 

Over time I've come to really love the retopology process. It's equal parts puzzle solving and chaos-controlling. Love it when a really messy triangle-ridden mess of a mesh becomes a simple, beautiful and organized quad-based model.

Your channel is a godsend for novice modelers like myself! Thank you guys.

I find doing retopo to be the most challenging, both organic and hard surface. Please make more of these awesome videos

Love the "two guys tutorial thing" you are doing! makes it so much fluid and interesting. Keep it up!

These real-time videos are awesome, the casual conversation is really nice "filler" to have playing in the background as i'm working and following along

I have always enjoyed listening to podcasts while I work. And I have to say listening to you guys while I work is fantastic. I totally did the John of Arc tutorial way back in 3D max 3.1 I very much remember the old days of learning 3D on the internet. It was quite a lot of spend a bunch of time on it, post it on a forum get feedback. Fun times! I work in games absolutely think that old school skills of proper topology and efficient geometry should really get more attention. I was never a teacher but I have certainly helped a lot of students improve their models over the year and SO often you see really simple issues. Top of the list is WAY too much geo way to early. Keep up the good work! I have been quite enjoying going back through your videos!

And another rude request guys, you said something about muscle sims, please talk about that and more advanced rigging. I think those can be very interesting topics

As always great content! You guys rock! ❤️🖥

love you guys! we greatly appreciate your efforts!!

man.. amazing tutorial. Keep on doing this great work! Simple, clear, stick to the point! congratss

You guys are so wonderful and entertaining to watch. You make what I love to learn so much fun! Thank you so much for your videos, I really feel more prepared going into the professional world with your help!

well this helped a tonn. its sweet to listen to u guys..

It's really funny watching this current day and knowing they both make really dope blender tutorials now

TNice tutorials video really helped! Thank you ❤

I think it’s safe to say for me that I’ve reached a point in my student career that I can just watch videos like this for hours, just suck up all this knowledge, and put it back into my work subconsciously

it's so crazy that you mentioned Joan of Arc tutorial, that's how I started my 3D modelling journey, hearing that alone, made everything so full circle for me, i love this channel

Wooow, loved smoothing after smooth! nice workflow

The little icon at the top of the viewport, the 24th icon, the rectangle with the arrow.. That's also isolate selected. When you do ctrl + 1 you'll see it change. It's handy to check if you did isolate selected in multiple viewports for instance.

Thanks for making this video helped a lot. Acutally answered a lot of questions I had.

I know this is just a tutorial but I could actually watch this just for the entertainment aspect! :D

ahhh I love you guys, I was searching for a nice retopo tuts and I got this notification

Great video! I loved the cheating part. Good to know that I'm not the only one struggling with hands and feet.

You guys is amazing .... Blessings, True Blessings!

Love this channel, you always upload the best tutorials! ¿What about one of how to use lights in internal and external scenarios!

My modeling has been on hold for so long, because I loathed the idea of retopologizing all that hard work on the base mesh, but your video has cleared the misunderstanding and made it really an exciting step.

i hope i can pass my tomorrow retopology class with this!

Just watching this video now and I'm actually chuckling about Blender, indeed 5 years ago it was way more late but its current state is far better now. I'm using both and both are really good. Maya is still more present in the industry because it was more advanced faster

Making a new 3d character for animation and had a problem with topology lucky I found your video !,😃😃🤩

Great stuff!

great explanation man

Nice to learn that soft selection works with quad draw, never thought about it! PS: i think those leg's loops would be better if they were not kind of "twisted" (talking about the mesh flow) Love this channel :) I'm brazilian

I like how these guys can look at tools through an objective lens instead of having the bias (sometimes even hate) a lot of people put in the comments.

AMAZING TUT

Great retopo video! Please do a wing video, or just other retopo solutions for different situations in general. Love this channel

Thank you soooo much, Can you please talk about texel density, Thx

could you guys doa vid talking about how to work muscle sim?

AMazing video, thanks a lot. Can you tell how exactly do you 'attach' the meshes you create separately?

Nice video, good job!

Guys i just recently started to use zbrush thanks to you and i made my first character. Now i'm retopologizing it. I'm new in this field because i studied Nuke and compositing and this is just a hobby so i don't know a lot of things. You said you can re-use a base mesh to retopo similar characters but i'm not entirely sure how, can you explain it quickly? You are awesome, i tried zbrush 4/5 years ago and i uninstalled it like 15 minutes in because i didn't understand its interface and now i created my first character in one week just with your videos

Thank you guys you make everything easy for us thank you love you guys :) XD

I love retopology, as a game developer / 3D modeller working on projects where a scene might include 1000 animated characters, I love using maya to retopo, mudbox for baking normals to capture the high res model's details and transfer to low res retopo'd model - then in Unity3D make use of mesh baker (which groups multiple models and makes an atlas so only one set pass is needed for multiple different models, as only one material is needed per group of different characters which saves computationally...same goes for the normals, since most material types include diffuse, normal, specular, and detail maps in one material, an atlas for each map type still only uses one material - which means one set pass for all that map data). There are other tricks too like using an Entity Component System...so 1000 independent characters can easily become 50,000 without much loss computationally. 8)

Amazing!! Tks bro!!

I've actually got two projects in the works where I'm using two softwares for their retopology. One using Zbrush's Retopo tool and another with Maya's Quad Draw tool. Both have their merits. PS: Love what you guys do!

"We'll see on Blender... I heard 2.8 is going to be great." This aged soooo well. ❤

I'm begging you, make a video on realistic hair creation with xgen

Very nice video guys! Thanks a lot! Kinda quick question, maybe.. How did you fix that bad poly at 37:25? I'm asking because i have encountered similar issues.

I realy like your videos, they are helping me a lot in college Can you guys made a video of retopology of hands and feets?

please do a tutorial for joints and hands! I don't know if you've done face yet but that's been really tough for me

could you make a video on how to reuse a hand retopology? like how to adapt it to the new mesh ?

Will this mesh will be good for rigging and animating?

I am quite used with blender, I can say with no doubt that wat makes blender faster isnt the tool itself, its just the shortcuts. they make retopology kinda frenetic.

It'd be great if you did one for the hands (:

Hey guys do I need to have a perfectly symmetrical mesh for retopologizing or I won’t be able to mirror it?

Not sure if you guys have considered it, but would you be willing to do little sculpting anatomy videos? I know I would benefit a lot from them, as I am sure many others would as well. 😀 Great vid guys!

I have a big question for you guys. When you are teaching in your schools, do you focus more on "how to use this tool/software"? or the "why is this done this way regardless of the tool"? I am asking because my school always focused on "this is how you use Maya" or "this is how you bake in Substance" and I find that useless since there are tons of youtube videos on "how to use X tool"

I have a question, when I'm doing retopo, save my progress and close Maya I then have a hard time trying to get Quad Draw to work again the next time I load my model. I can see the quads I've made earlier, It just won't let me use quad draw no matter what. Is there anyway to solve this problem?

Great video! How would you guys retopo cloth like pants with many very big wrinkles? Would love to see.

Very nice video!!! My retopo start to getting real slow after some time, do you guys know how to fix it?

Regarding the "messy part" on the chest - I can see that you would want to remove the 3-pole. Is the other thing that you were looking at the 5-pole on part of the surface where the shape changes considerably and goes under the arm? I would think there would be a pole somewhere on the chest because of direction change, same as there is on the shoulder blade. But to clarify, it should not be in the crease where the shoulder would deform?

Great! Can you make a video on how you would go about using Mayas skinwrap to "retopo" a general base mesh into a specific different character mesh? i would love to see that

hello.. can you change the characters geometry after retopology!!!???

Videos are Awesome! It will be helpful if you will provide the Sample Files too for practice purposes. Thank You! Greet from India!

Well i don't mind. I uses Blender and watch most of your vids and i've learned a lot from it.

hooly shit when you guys talked about the joan of arc tutorial I had a nostalgia explosion

Will you guys explain Reproject the detail to low poly mesh also in future lessons...

Is there a situation that you would benefit from using a cylinder and shrinkwrap the legs/arms instead of quad drawing? it covers a large area quickly, similar to "tubes" in topo gun.

Could you guys make a video on retopologizing the hands? :) Also, blender is definitely faster with modifiers like shrinkwrap, mirror, subdivision surface, makes for less clicks and easier visualization, It also feels like snapping is more accessible in blender as well.

Enjoyed the video! Would reto’ing in maya be the final step after all sculpting is final? If so would you just use displacement map to bring the details back for rendering and compositing!? Thanks again!! Just an Animator learning zbrush🤘🏾

Hey guys, for some reason, I cannot activate symmetry while retopologizing. So I decided to proceed one one side. Is there a way to duplicate my progress on the other side? Or better yet, how do i activate symmetry? Thanks!

Could you disable subdivision? And can you project all the details like in zbrush and bake normal maps from the high rez to the low poly? In zbrush, I like how you can reproject the details or make the low poly model look more accurate to the high poly model even if the high poly model isn't detailed at all. When I use blender, the shrink wrap is horrible. apply it while you have subdivision modifier on and it don't look accurate at all to how I want it to look when smooth. It would always look more skinny or smaller. While for zbrush, the low poly model can have as much subdivisions at it want to be able to reproject and it will make the model look exactly how i want it to be and I can pose it without having to worry about the topology trying to stick to the model. That way my model will look exactly like my high poly model without looking so skinny or smaller whenever I have subdivisions on. I wish blender could do something about that because unless i apply subdivision surface to my model and then apply shrink wrap, the shape will always look different after applying shrink wrap if I do that first.time I do NOT want to add too much topology on my model as it will be harder for me to weight paint. Another thing I like from zbrush is how while you have the subdivisions on, you can then sculpt on details on your low poly model and create normal maps from that one subtool as long as it has more than one subdivision. I wish blender has the same thing because having to do all the tedious work with having both models selected and baking then but then not working because the distance is too far or something. I'm thinking of getting Maya and I'm wondering if the projection and sculpting and baking works about the same way. I could of done the same thing on zbrush if i love it so much, but creating the UV maps is a pain because creating the seams is no where close to how Maya or blender does it by selecting the verticies. Zbrush tries to generate them and to make the seams you have to paint them and hope that it generates it properly based off where I painted it.

How do you use a "base mesh"? Do you start by sculpting on it. Then re projecting the sculpt to the basemesh? Does this reproject keep the UVs and such? Then subdivide the new projected mesh and sculpt on that on higher levels?

What about creating characters in Zbrush using SculptrisPro mode then retopologize in Maya for Uving !?

my qstn after retopology what u do to get back all the details back onto your low res model... is that only baking high res model onto low res by creating normal map or it is by taking ur low res model in zbrush and reproject it but after that still having very high poly of that low res model bcz of dividing it couple of times.. so what's the solution plz tell me...

How often do you guys have to retopologize a pre-forearm-twist? - Some humanoid models has forearms with topology twisting from the elbow to the wrist. I'm guessing because the palms are facing down and it would need to be calculated for muscle flow.

Hey guys, I was wondering if you usually use a tablet for Maya? If so, do you usually prefer to work in a smaller working area (higher tablet sensitivity) or use the default working area? Love your content and thanks in advance!

blender got a retopo-flow, and it is faster as you said . Lol .....I love you guys

Is this mesh available for free ?? I just have the head from retopoflow course :P

By the way, using tab key with middle mouse button extends the loops. Just my two cents

"I think nails are separate." "Yeah, you can pull them off." :D

What is your computer configuration ?

A super handy trick is to use maya's alembic cache to make a GPU cache of the high res, then retopo on that.

I kind of wish you used a conventional body for the tutorial, but it's still a great tutorial as always.

Is 3DCoat better at Retopo with all the tools? Maya feels like it's limited with only the qua-draw tool. Maya snaps through the surface a lot it seems.

Blender 2.8 is fkin awesome :P

Im having trouble exporting the reto mesh into Zbrush. It keeps exporting both the new reto and the detailed mesh I used to retopologize. How can I just export the new mesh?

Sorry for necroposting but sometimes when I keep adding quads, some of the points/vertices become unselectable. For some reason when I hover over them I just can't click and manipulate them in any way in quad draw mode. Found 0 results when googling and it happens a lot. Anyone knows what causes this and how to fix it?

I find retopo to be really relaxing. It's as you said, kinda like solving a puzzle. I'm curious how many people find it relaxing compared to how many find it boring/annoying. Who's the majority from your experience?

Some times, is so hard select some vertices, rotate rotate and try againg and nothing

speaking of poly modelling in 20:00, is poly modelling for characters outdated now or is it better to be able to sculpt then retopo in this day and age?

how to make it color blue?

Can you mould from mudbox to maya and show us the same and how do u get back the fine details.

hi, thanks for the very informative video, im a novice modeller and ive learned a lot from it ! i have a question if you dont mind, when you said you reuse a premade hand model with good topology on a new highpoly mesh, how exactly do you do that, what if the new highpoly hand's proportion difference is really noticable, through a shrink wrap modifier of some kind ?

Hey guys, say you had a character that's as toned as the current spider-man, would you make a loop boarder around his biceps, hamstrings, traps etc. or is it not worth it? just want a reference. Love the vids.

I really liked watching these. But I was wondering if you guys could lease show us the proper way to retopo a cute animal muzzle please? Like no one ever makes good videos about that. They are a little hard to approach.

Glad you're doing a tutorial on this but what about wrap 3d

Do you have any tutorial on retopo with 3dcoat?

Hi can u please show how to retopology a hand please

Hey guys, wanted to request a video on base meshes and some tips for going about it. What's important to include, what's not so important. I know you can pick up a bunch of free bases meshes, but that feels a bit like cheating

BUT how do we get the details from zbrush mesh to this low poly mesh without doing reprojection..?

can we do zremesh first then retopo