Hello World! I am currently working on my homelab environment. Right now that involves making a default NixOS config from which I’ll base all my virtual machines.
Featured Blog Post:
title: retopology date: 2026-04-05 05:19:28 layout: post —
I spent this weekend refamiliarizing myself with Blender. I learned some concepts about retopology and tried to apply them to a model of a sci-fi astronaut I bought online. Because the model was so intricate, doing it manually was tedious and I stopped after the helmet. Afterwards, I looked into some automated features but wasn’t pleased with the fidelity they gave me at similar poly counts. The requirements for this model are tricky; it’s getting printed at 28mm scale so finer details don’t matter, but I’d like to pose it before printing so it needs retopology. My current plan is to give the retopology tool a really high polygon budget, exceeding that of the sculpted model if needed. I can then rig and pose this model without any weird artifacts. Before exporting the model I would apply a decimate modifier to bring the poly count, and file size, down. The decimation shouldn’t diminish the print quality. I expect to wrap this up and get my prints returned some time this month. I’ll upload a comparison below.
As a learning experience, this is great. But I need a better workflow if I’m doing this again in the future. This test reminds me of an anecdote a family friend told me. He is an aerospace engineer and would notice junior engineers eagerly calculating aircraft part lifetimes down to the .001 position. What looks like diligence is actually wasted effort, since those parts are replaced half way into their lifetime by regulation.