- Essentially yes. You only have to worry about polycount in the sense of avoiding way too many polygons. Blender sculptors in general need to stay below the several-million polygon amounts in order to avoid lag (computer slowing down). But it’s not hard to stay below that amount, in which case there’s little-to-no worrying about the polycount.
But the joy of sculpting is you can 95% focus on just the shape of the model rather than the structure of the mesh.
- Exactly. Retopology is 100% about mesh structure since you get the shape for free from the sculpture. I find that my models are much higher quality both in form and structure when I sculpt + retopo, especially for organic shapes (human characters, creatures, etc)
- There’s not a clear answer for this since it widely varies depending on the platform. For example, a mobile game will require lower poly counts for models compared to a console/PC game. To give you a number though, I landed on 20K polygons for the robot character in our first-person-shooter we’re making. It’s kind of a mid-range polycount between mobile and console.
- There is no holding edges in low-poly models since it doesn’t use a subsurf modifier. However for low-poly models, it’s common to set certain edges to appear “hard” while others appear smooth. No holding edges involved, just adjusting normals for effect. I go over all this in great detail in the robot modeling course.
