The character for the monologue, who I have named Naqshi, needed a base mesh that was clean for animation. The sculpt was done with dynamesh, which doesn’t give you clean edgeflow or low poly optimization.
I typically use the remesh feature in zbrush with the guidelines to show it where to draw loops. I wanted to tackle it with a bit more control and learn how to manually retopo. Zbrush has a nice tool that will allow you to draw on a surface to create individual faces and connect them. You essentially have to draw every vert, but it is a necessary evil to get what you want.
You can see the process here:
I did an auto remesh on the dyna sculpt so it was quicker to process, and to give myself some guidelines to follow when I was doing the retopo. I start with lip and eye loops, and try to draw out from there. I originally tried to draw on the mesh and plan out the entire low poly remesh, but I was having some trouble with it and just wanted to dive in. I think if I did it again I would probably draw out the remesh before doing anything, just because its easier to fix problems in that process versus during retopo.
This was the final base after the retopo. There were some loops around the mouth that I could have deleted but unfortunately, I got ahead of myself with a couple of things and I don’t want to go back and edit the topo again because I will have to reproject and reUV and re-export some maps. I will be applying a displacement map so it shouldn’t matter that much.
After I had the base, I projected the details from the Dynamesh back into it at a level holding around 5 million poly I believe.
Winegardner Design Journal and Portfolio 