Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Retopology
Also called retopo, retopologizing
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Building a new, deliberately laid-out mesh over an existing surface, by hand or with guided automation. The goal is not fewer polygons; it is edge flow that deforms correctly, loops that follow the anatomy or the feature lines, and a quad-dominant cage that subdivides cleanly. Detail returns by baking.
In practice
Said of anything dense — scans, sculpts, CAD tessellations. Automatic retopology is remeshing; if the asset deforms or subdivides, a person still does this by hand.
Not to be confused with
- DecimateReducing triangle count by collapsing edges in order of how little each collapse changes the surface, usually by a quadric error metric. Silhouette is preserved; layout is not. The output is an irregular triangle soup that deforms badly and unwraps worse — correct for a static prop, wrong for anything that moves.
- RemeshReplacing a mesh's topology wholesale with a new, evenly distributed one approximating the same surface. Voxel remeshers rasterize to a grid and re-extract, guaranteeing watertightness and losing everything below cell size; quad remeshers fit a quad field, optionally guided, and get closer to a layout someone could work with.
- LODA set of alternative representations of one asset at decreasing complexity, swapped by screen coverage or distance so the renderer spends detail where it can be seen. Authored deliberately, since silhouette and material must survive the switch. The transition is the hard part — a visible pop is a failed LOD.