Yr2 Week 18: Retopology and unwrapping

By the end of this week I aimed to have my model finished, unwrapped and baked, which I have pretty much managed to do!

This is a screenshot of my final model. It doesn't look too different from the previous one, except I have changed the hair, added details to the clothing using alphas and also added more details to the hands so they no longer look inflated.

When my final model was finished, I used the decimation master tool in zbrush to give me an idea of what a lower poly version would look like and to use in other programs when re-topologising.

I originally started re-topping the mesh in Topogun, but later discovered 3D-Coat is much easier, and swapped to this. It would have been a lot quicker to start the process in 3D-Coat, but I now know both programs which is always useful.

These are the images showing my re-topped models from Topogun/3D-Coat. I had a little bit of a problem which was that the lowest version was only 5,400 tris but it needed to be near to 15,000. Subdividing the mesh gave me 23,200 tris, which was too much. I had to go back to Topogun and manually divide the geometry as much as I could while trying to keep the model quite even.

Finally I managed to get the mesh to a more reasonable level. At 12,529 tris, I am still not completely hitting the budget, but I feel as though my model does not need any more topology at this point, and adding more loops was simply messing up the topology in the face and neck. I think this model uses the topology the most efficiently out of all of the versions, and is the one I will be using for my final model.

Above shows my two models side by side, with the low poly ready to be unwrapped for baking. I managed to unwrap my model and then did a quick test back which worked much better than I had anticipated, I was expecting it to not work at all and be quite frustating, but I was quite pleased that it worked on my first attempt. However, there were a few artifacts so I plan to render each part out individually to prevent this happening and create a nicer bake.

All that is left to do now is texture and finish my concepts! Which is what I will be doing this upcoming week.