Retopology!

Over the past week I have been retopologising the body for the reservoir dogs characters. This is quite a laborious process, but is not overly taxing, just time consuming if you want to do it to a high standard, which I do, obviously! My technique when it comes to retopology it to first use poly paint to draw topology onto the mesh, and then use the ZBrush retopology tools to create a new mesh over the existing high poly mesh. When doing this it is very important to make sure I pay a great deal of attention to silhouette of the high poly, and make the low poly follow the silhouette as closely as possible. This has been rather easy task with this model, as there are no major extrusions of the form to worry about. I actually managed to get a retopology of the whole body that was around 4100 polygons, however I think I am going to up the subdivision on a few components and then reduce them in Maya, aiming for a poly count on the body of around 9000, allowing for 2000 for the head if needed.

Shot of the mesh as it is in its low poly form.

The next stage after this was to project the details from the high poly onto the new low-poly mesh. This process can get hellish, and I seem to learn a bit more about the approach each time I do it. I think that a mistake I made this time was that I use the extrusion tool to create the clothing, this works great, but it makes detail transfer a pain. A better way to do this would be to make a hole-less mesh and use that to generate the initial high poly, then retopologise  the whole mesh, not just the parts that need to be seen and project the detail from that on then just trim out excess details later in maya. This will probably give a much more accurate projection without any of the strange artefacts I was getting. An easy way to explain it is to say, I want to make a t-shirt, instead of modelling it with space going through the centre, I will model it as if I am chiseling it out of a block of clay, and not hollowing the inside out, whereas what I did was make it with the centre taken out, like a real shirt would have.

The next stage was to create the UV's. For this I used Roadkill. Roadkill has become a massive part of my pipeline for unwrapping anything organically shaped. It turns a job that could take hours into one that only takes a third of the time, and gives great results too!

UV sheet for the model.

Over the next week I hope to get the texture done for the suit, and have it re-proportioned to fit Mr. Pink's body shape. I'd also Like to have the Mr. Pink head retopologised and UV'd too.