GameDev Toolbox: Instant Meshes
140Welcome to another episode in the GameDev Toolbox, a look at essential tools in the lives of game developers, be they programmer, artist or sound tech.
In GameDev, even with the massive advances in game engines and hardware, we simply cant use ultra high resolution models. However working at or sculpting in million+ polygon levels is very much the norm. Generally then the painful process of retopology comes in, where we create a low resolution model from the high polygon source. There have been tools for years to do this job for us, in fact every major 3D app has them built in, and most of them do a very awful job.
Todays GameDev Toolbox pick however, Simply Meshes, does an excellent job. It preserves quads amazingly well and allows you to define the flow of the surface in the generated mesh. Oh yeah... and it's completely free and open source!
You can download Simple Meshes from: https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes
To see the retopology process in Blender, check out this recent tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR7R4PDcO5c