Is it better to just do Manual Retopology vs Decimate/Remesh?

[Deygus]

I see people doing a lot of decimation on stuff but when I try to do it I always mess it up and when I bake a normal map I notice little cracks when I test the map out from the high poly on the low poly or worse it looks bad with artifacts or parts sticking out wrong.

I am under the impression I just need to suck it up and get more into just doing retopo the manual way.

It seems like my biggest problem doing this is trying to figure out how far down I can go without losing too much detail but still getting good results when I bake out a map somehow.

I know there's programs like Instamesh and Meshlab as well but I struggle there too.

I think I've done watched like 10 different videos on this by now and still can't seem to get it right..

So far I've tried this in Blender and also in Shadermap that I have, same issue.

Any one have any advice on this?

[Pte Jack]

Decimating mesh - what you are doing is allowing Blender to reduse the poly count to the cest of its ability to match the number of polys you need. The result is not pretty. Blender tries to maintain the integrety of the model shape and cuts mesh by merging vertexes together to get to the required number. It does not try to maintain symmetry or edge loops. Also Weight painting can be drastically affected and if try to decimate an object with shapekeys, you may not be able to apply the modifies or your shapekeys may be deformed beyond recognition.

If you want to maintain this stuff, then you have to (as you say) suck it up and manually reptop your model.

Not sure about remensh, haven't tried it.

[Deygus]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Decimating mesh - what you are doing is allowing Blender to reduse the poly count to the cest of its ability to match the number of polys you need. The result is not pretty. Blender tries to maintain the integrety of the model shape and cuts mesh by merging vertexes together to get to the required number. It does not try to maintain symmetry or edge loops. Also Weight painting can be drastically affected and if try to decimate an object with shapekeys, you may not be able to apply the modifies or your shapekeys may be deformed beyond recognition.

If you want to maintain this stuff, then you have to (as you say) suck it up and manually reptop your model.

Not sure about remensh, haven't tried it.

Okay, I was messing around with it to try to understand it along with watching more videos but, figured I would ask about it because I know some of you in here have a lot more experience than I do with this sort of thing.

The remesh gave a nicer result but still kinda high, thought I could go a little lower but after further testing it looks like it becomes problematic similarly if I go too low though the results are much nicer.

Anyways, thanks.