UV maping and textures for low poly mesh

Question

I have question about blender UVs. I making a character for game and noticed that my polycount are very high and I will need to retopologize a mesh manually or with addon program. In one video the guy remove the texture and and make his high mesh poly in UV map and add it in low poly and work find. It's posible to UV map the high mesh poly with texture, as a single texture and add it to my low poly mesh or i need remove the texture to bake the effect of high mesh to low? For the moment its easier for me to go with high poly mesh and add textures in difference small part for efect that go with low poly and draw the texture in Mudbox or phototoshop.

Answer 1

Yeah. Basically you need to bake the hi-poly model's texture upon the low-poly model. So:

• retopo your hipoly model to get the lowpoly.
• UVmap the lowpoly one and create a new image upon wich you'll bake the hipoly texture. Make sure this is the image asigned to the lowpoly model when you go into edit mode. If it's not, just select it from the dropping menu, it should stay.
• with both models in the same location (overlapped) and selected (being the lowpoly the active one), go to properties bar > render > bake. Choose TEXTURE in the bake mode menu, and make sure SELECTED TO ACTIVE is checked. I usually uncheck CLEAR too. And press BAKE.
• this way the texture from the hipoly model should be baked upon your new image, using the lowpoly model's UVmap.

hopefully thatll help. Im a noob myself so take that with some reserve tho.