Retopology Hell

Since the blog is slowly turning into my diary of successes and failures of learning to animate in 3D, I might as well write an update so I can look back on this at some later date when I can feel superior to this curre nt version of me who is utterly lost… At the moment, I see triangles when I sleep. I've come to hate triangles. I despite their three-sided nature, their pointedness, and the fact that they've almost impossible to transform into with four sides. The animation self-learner course continues with my making some major mistakes. Yesterday, I modeled and textured a head and it looked pretty good. I then tried to animate the mouth and hit all kinds of trouble, which is pretty much where I'm now stuck. I'd ignored the advice of the professionals and hadn't 'retopologized' my model. Basically (if I have this right), when you model a character, it can have any number of polygons inside it. Some get up into the multiple millions, which look impressive in the modelling software but are completely impractical when it comes to trying to animate them on a home PC. So what you do is draw a very low resolution net of squares all over your original model, trying to avoid triangles when you can (thou

Then using some magic (black cats, voles eardrums, a bottle of distilled spirit), you combine this low density model with your previous high density mogh even this feels impossible). del, and the result is something you can animate, which will only have a polygons in the thousands, rather than the millions. The reason I'm stuck is finding an easy way to do the retoplogy work. It isn't helped by a PC which keeps crashing, losing my topology work… It's hell. Just hell. And if the version of me in the future could only get in touch and tell me where I'm going wrong, I (I say I but I suppose I mean we) will and would be very grateful.