Automatic just isnt as good as manual and it is causing me problems. So I decided to face my fears and try manual retopology. I still gotta do the rest of the body but I know the head is the most important part. I know its not perfect but do you think it will work well, it should at least do better than the voxel remesh since its manual topology.
The only thing to watch out for is the lower lip. Make sure that it isn’t a singular face. Other than that, it’s looking good.
Ok I’ll fix that but just curious what’s wrong with it being a singular face?
Well for this instance it may be okay because the face won’t be animated, but if the orc were to have facial expressions it would need more topology. If I were to texture it like this and have it move in the animation it would cause major stretching in the texture.
Another thing about this is when you transport it to another program (like Unreal) it will want to triangulate the mesh and it may generate a messy mesh in this area. With having it in quads (or tris) Unreal won’t need to do any work into guessing as you have already made a road map for it.
Ok thanks I just added more topology to it so it should be good. To be honest I think my retopology at least for the torso is very unproffessionally done and I know almost nothing about how the edge flows should be done but considering that this should be cleaner than a voxel remesh and yet the voxel remesh animated ok I think this should be fine for the course and I can improve retopo in other characters as I advance. What do u think?
Definitely. 
We all need to start from somewhere, this maybe a good process to go through. I personally haven’t gone too deep into retopo. I did retopo that creature myself, but later on I thought of ways to improve upon it (which I still need to do).
Overtime as I learned Blender, the one thing that’s absolutely necessary is to keep trying. Even when you need to remodel the whole thing, that’s what your supposed to do for this process.
As a challenge to myself, I have been trying to model cars. I spent time remodeling the same car about six times (a days worth of work for each attempt), until just this week:
It just clicked. There are still some issues I need to address, but this is certainly more than I had before.
Wow this looks perfect to me good job!
Thanks. I will definitely do retopo for the driver this car is going to have.
Good luck its weird but humans can be harder to make especially with hair and clothing but I think you will do great!
Avoid 6 way poles.
Like to the right of the corner of the eye (His left eye)
Also N-gons, the second loop below the bottom lip has faces that are rectangular and have more than 4 verts/edges.
Ngon on the forhead over the eyebrow area, 6 verts.
Triangle in the temple area.
Yes, you will need to connect all that lower lip’s biiiig n-gons.
Nice car model. Bodywork texture gives it the impression it is an old toy/model.
Humans are harder as we all know what they should be like, and any oddity we know something is ‘odd’, even if we can’t put out finger on it. That is why so much 3D work is fantasy, sci fi, etc.
However a creature or alien turns out, it could be ‘real’. 
Thanks unfortuanately I dont quite know everything you are talking about because grant doesnt really teach them in this course but I will try to tidy up everything I can and I added more topology to the mouth. If you can find any pics for some examples than that would be awesome!
Sorry terms one gets used to.
Image reference quickly made up not the greatest but should serve.
is an n-gon. A ploygon of over 4 vertices. It is not actually a quad despite looking ‘square’. Note red circles, extra verts so not a quad.
is a tri (angle) simple enough, but the same applies, if one edge was subdivided it would look triangular but be a Quad, due to vert count.
All quads with a central ‘Pole’.
A pole is a vert where 3 or more edges meet. This one has 6, that is not a big disaster but generally better to be no more than 5.
Quads, come in many shapes. and are the foundation of good topology, as they enable loops. A cut from one edge directly to the other opposite edge. If you have 5 verts or 3 making the face there is no ‘opposite’ edge, so loops stop.
a 5 pole standard and important for turning loops directions.
a 3 pole standard and important for turning loops directions.
technically a 4 pole, but loops can only go straight, (well without very distorted topology)
The green dashed lines show loop flow round poles. See how number 7 tends to straightness, and the important 3 and 5 poles (numbers 5&6) change the direction of a loop.
Quad topology is important for these loop flows. It is also important for subdivisions, particularly the subdivision surface modifier. Quads subdivide neatly into 4 more quads.
You can test what problems subdivision can have by first adding a plane, and right clicking it, and selecting subdivide.
All works nicely!
Now with another plane select one edge and subdivide it so the plane now has 5 verts not 4.
Select all the now 5 vert plane, and subdivide it too. Go to vert mode to see what it did, as it did not make extra faces, it could not.
Imagine that topological chaos on a multi thousand vert character.
Taken from the web, the Main loops for a human head. It may need slight differences following Orc shapes! Look for the poles and how they turn the loops.
Thanks! Quite a good demonstration. Obviously it will still take practice but that helped a lot!
