Retopping

01 -05/11/21 - Week 5

Retopping was quite a long process but I felt a bit more confident with it than before.

Sculpting the face was probably the easiest thing for me as there are clear animation loops to follow since most humanoid faces have the same features in the same places, so to find reference for this it is very easy. At first, I went very lop poly with the face but then using open Subdiv I made it a bit more to the poly count I was thinking, obviously the face is the most detailed part of the topology in general so I was free to go a bit more dense here. I'm happy with the topology though I'm really hoping the feedback that I get from the hand in will tell me if there is things that I need to adjust since I still feel quite inexperienced with retop and some of its rules.

Moving on to the rest of the body, I did start to struggle a little bit as this is where topology can really vary and it is ultimately decided on the clothing the character is wearing. Thankfully, I found some very helpful topology references (mainly Wattson from Apex Legends, created by Sam Sun) that somewhat mirrored the type of clothing that my character is wearing and used this to help me. The waders was probably the hardest here as obviously this was not something that I could find reference easily so I just had to follow the rules I was noticing from the sculpt I was mainly basing my topology from. These were, have more topology near a seam/edge and if a fold is very prominent, add some more topology for it to have more effect on the silhouette.

Something that I have decided to do that is different from my second year character is to only retop what will be visible by the player, such as the fact that the chest waders don't have any back etc. I think this is reasonable but I am again hoping that if it is not that it will be noted in my feedback.

The hair was probably the most time consuming and difficult part of the sculpt. I decided to make it mostly one mesh, separated at each hair tie. The top part of the hair was probably the most difficult as I decided to make this part asymmetrical due to the difference in fringe. It took me a long time to figure out some of the pieces to retop since they were so varying in size, shape and depth. One thing that I think did play to me was the fact that they are so angular as this meant that each strand only had to be 2-3 polys across each. 

One thing that is really frustrating is that I felt that by the end of it my topology doesn't look too clean and there is a lot of rectangles. The hair is definitely the most high poly aspect of the whole model by this point so I'm not sure whether to add in a few more loops to make things more square and neat or if this is just adding topology to areas where it wont show. It was also very time consuming in the first place and to add more time fixing this may be a problem, though if it is not good enough of course I will need to spend more time on this.

One problem I have encountered that I am not sure how or whether to fix is the overall tri count is rather low from what I expected. My initial goal as mentioned was 30-40k however with everything retopped now, I am only really just hitting 30k. I am hoping this is still acceptable and realistic for the character I have created.

Other than the problems that I have listed I am done with the retop of the character, I am hoping to have it unwrapped by the beginning of next week so I am all ready for texturing once I get back round to this project in the coming month.