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I'm making a game in the unity engine and for my models i'm using blender 2.6. The thing is that i'm pretty new to graphics design (modeling, sculpting, etc) and by following some tutorials i've managed to make some very high poly meshes for my characters with the sculpt editor, the meshes have about 1.5M - 2M faces and of course a game character should be less than 30K faces so the game runs smoothly with good optimization on an average pc.

my question is how do i translate the details of the high poly stuff to low poly meshes (7k - 30k faces), i've heard about uv unwrapping and stuff but i'm not sure what is the process to follow.

i don't mind if the recommendation is very hard and for advanced users because the primary thing i want to do with this, is to learn.

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  • $\begingroup$ Since retopology is a rather tedious task, for practicing you could strip your model of any multiresolution modifier (unless you used dynamic topology). It isn't going to be as good as manual retopology but maybe good enough for your purposes. $\endgroup$
    – Gunslinger
    Jan 14, 2014 at 11:26
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    $\begingroup$ The following thread on the BlenderArtists forum has been going strong for the past 1.5 years and the discussion often turns to retopo. This will help with all the more subtle details after you have followed the advice offered by gandalf3 above. blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?264568-Dyntopo-tests $\endgroup$
    – MarcClintDion
    Jan 20, 2014 at 11:54

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One way to reduce mesh density is the decimate modifier, however for the workflow you want (creating a game asset) I think you want Retopology.

This is a workflow which gives your more control over the final result, however it will take longer as it is a manual process.

Some helpful addons and built in functionality for retopologizing your mesh:

Some tutorials and reference material:

After you have a lower topology mesh you can bake normal maps etc. to make it appear more detailed than it really is.

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  • $\begingroup$ ok, so i did a quick search about retopology and found an answer that explained it very well. one person said that he could put the same detail that a 12m polys mesh had into a 8500 polys mesh. so, i'll take a look at it and to the process of baking the normals. Any other advice? $\endgroup$
    – Dylan Velez
    Jan 14, 2014 at 8:15
  • $\begingroup$ +1 for Bsurfaces, specially for hard surfaces with well-defined curves $\endgroup$
    – rfabbri
    Oct 11, 2016 at 10:20
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    $\begingroup$ @Leander Thanks, fixed as well as I could $\endgroup$
    – gandalf3 ♦
    Dec 8, 2018 at 21:35

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