Blue - Retop

28-04/03/22 - Week 8

This week I have been retopping my third character. As I anticipated last week, this ended up taking me a long time and by the end of this week I haven't been able to finish as much as I wanted to initially.

The large majority of this retop was again similar to the previous two characters - creating a rough base and then using turbosmooth to get a good amount of loops. I did end up having to work around a few issues, one of them mainly being the wings which as first I wasn't sure quite how to approach, but I ended up using a very similar method except I just had to be very careful with the placement to make it make sense and work with turbosmooth properly. They are currently very high poly and this needs to be fixed, though I am hoping once I collapse the symmetry on it I will be able to remove unnecessary loops and lower the tri count here.

Another thing I struggled with was the hair, I tried to do some more research on stylised hair and how people usually approached this, though I found that the method that I used for my professional practice character was mostly correct, but I needed it to be tided up a lot more and more evenly spread out. This was a challenge as starting with a low amount of polys then adding loops in didn't appear to work since the geometry that the low poly was conforming to was so complicated and not at all smooth, so I decided to hand retop this. The issue with this is that it took me a very long time and I have now only managed to finish both ponytails, one side of the hair and the fringe. I decided to segment the fringe to try to make this a bit more logical and this really helped in comparison to ways I have done it before - trying to keep everything in a large lump. I also hope this will help with the hair looking more natural. I did consider hair cards for this but I thought as I'd already tried hard with the zbrush sculpt I wanted to keep these, though I am maybe going to make the fly aways into planes.

I have mostly finished everything but I just need to create the low poly petals and place them correctly and then finish off some bits and pieces, but for now I need to move on to hair cards as I have been told that these are very challenging and meticulous. Overall, I think I made good progress and I tried really hard to get as much done as I could this week.

I am away next week, so I will come back the week after and start haircards, I don't have much of a day by day plan as I'm unsure how long each step will take and what each one will be, but here are my theoretical goals for then: