@yukinoh1989 That’s exactly what they do in gaming; make a high res mesh, retopo a low poly mesh, then bake the high res out into a normal map, not a displacement map because the displacement map will actually deform the geometry, so you need lots of geometry to get the details, which defeats the whole purpose. A normal map is better because it saves out lighting information in the red, green, and blue channels to fake the lighting. Here’s a video.
My focus is in game development, so I’m not sure about things outside that. My best guess is if you’re doing something film quality, it might be better to have high res models, textures, etc for more accurate lighting. Games are a lot of faking and resource management whereas films are nothing but a sequence of images, so might as well make high quality images, right? That’s my best guess, though.
For animation, you should absolutely retopo your mesh. Beyond that, though, I don’t know what’s the best way to tackle the animation pipeline because I have no desire to be an animator. Maybe take a look through the animation courses and see if any answers lie there.
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