Play Creative takes a look at the built-in polyRemesh and polyRetopo nodes for Auto-Retopology in Maya.

Maya has made a few advancements in retopology in the last few versions, but have fallen short of providing an automatic workflow for creating organized geometry. For a quick retopology, artists are currently limited to using the Quad Draw tool, manually cleaning up your merged objects, exporting to another software to retopologize, or some combination of all.

The good news is it appears Autodesk is now implementing an automatic retopology tool-kit very soon (fresh off the back of adding Dynamic Tessellation to the Mudbox toolkit).

How do we know? Well, the tools already exist inside Maya – no plugins required! Better yet – they’re as easy as two clicks to use.

Play Creative (playcreative.io) has a short tutorial on how to use these excellent tools and dramatically speed up your hard surface workflow in Maya (as well as create a shelf button). You don’t need to wait for a wholly implemented version, some of them are useable right now. Check it out now and watch your retopology woes drift away.

About Play Creative

Play Creative create Beginner to Expert online courses for all stages of the 3D pipeline – for Maya, Mudbox, Substance Painter and other software.

Their courses come from over 10 years in the CGI Industry and a desire to help students build complete 3D Projects, from Concept to Completion. With understandable and easy-to-follow tutorials, this is University learning at a hobbyist price.