Retopology
Rebuilding a dense scan or sculpt as a cleaner, lighter mesh with edge loops placed where the model needs to bend and hold its silhouette.
See it
What it is
Retopology is rebuilding the surface of a dense sculpt, scan, or messy generated mesh with cleaner and usually lighter geometry. The new mesh follows the old silhouette but places deliberate edge loops around joints, eyes, mouths, and other areas that must bend or hold detail.
Reach for it before rigging, UV unwrapping, or shipping a scanned asset to the web. A clean low-poly mesh is easier to animate, unwrap, edit, and render. ZBrush's ZRemesher and Blender's RetopoFlow addon automate part of the work. The high-poly source is not discarded: its fine pores, creases, and cuts are baked into normal and ambient occlusion maps for the lighter result.
Gotcha: automatic decimation reduces triangle count but does not create animation-friendly edge flow. Good retopology protects the silhouette and gives deforming areas enough evenly spaced loops, while spending fewer polygons on flat rigid regions. Bake with a checked projection cage or details can land on the wrong side of thin parts.
Ask AI for it
Retopologize this high-poly character in Blender using face snapping, a Shrinkwrap modifier, and a Mirror modifier. Build quad loops around the eyes, mouth, shoulders, elbows, fingers, hips, and knees; keep rigid areas sparse, preserve the silhouette, and target 30,000 triangles after triangulation. Create one non-overlapping UV set, then use Blender's Selected to Active bake with a manually checked cage to transfer tangent-space normal and ambient occlusion maps from the high-poly source. Test the result in extreme bent poses before export to GLB.