From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Optimization with the Retopology modifier

Optimization with the Retopology modifier - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Optimization with the Retopology modifier

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- [Instructor] Retopologization is a process of rebuilding a polygon mesh in order to change its level of detail, or simply to give it better edge flow so that the polygon edges actually follow the contours of the shape. In the bad old days, retopology was a manual process in which the artist needed to trace over a mesh, using it as a scaffold to build a completely different, new mesh. But now, retopology is an automated process. It's implemented in 3ds Max as a modifier. I'm going to use it in this case to create a level of detail version of this netsuke Japanese ornamental sculpture. If we select one of those, and look up in the statistics up here, it's 64,000 polygons. And if we turn on edged faces with F4, we'll see that it's pretty dense, and it's also poorly structured. We've got lots of teeny tiny triangles, and they're not actually following the contours of the shape here. So we can really improve this. It will benefit quite a lot from retopologization. So we can see this a…

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