Retopology #2

Dev Diary #35

After having retopologized the face, it was time to move on to the body! As I did with the face, I started by blocking out key areas and placing loops of quads around them to maintain some consitent edge loops and flow.

After creating the edge loops, I could then easily fill in the gaps and connect it all together.

Instead of just continuing down from the torso and chest, I decided to first do the hands so that it would be easier to connect the base of the hands to the arms. This means I can focus more on getting good topology for the hands (since they will arguably deform the most out of all the limbs) instead of worrying about how I will connect them to the arm topology.

To retopologise the hands, I started by adding some loops around the fingertips and nails and then extruding them downwards to the base of the fingers. After that, I added some loop cuts around the joints and then added extra loop cuts around those for better deformation. The next obstacle with retopologising the hands is reducing the poly count as the fingers merge into the hand. Using the knuckles as a focus point, I used some of the previously mentioned techniques to seamlessly lower the poly count while retaining quad topology. From here, I continued to extrude down the hand but paid close attention to the thumb and how it would deform as well.

While it's not perfect, I'm happy with the results of my hand topology as I feel I was able to include enough detail in the places that needed it the most. Despite this, I think improvement could have been made to the fingertips in the form of reducing the poly count even further, AND improvment to how, and more specifically where, I placed my poly count reducing edge loops.

Now that the hands were done, I could fill in the gaps of the model with more topology. You might notice in the picture below that the arms and legs have less topology than the torso and chest. This is because the arms and legs only deform around the knees and elbows, so as long as those have nice topology and lots of edge loops, the rest can have less and still look natural in game. This also reduces the overall poly count of the model and will result in better performance in game engines.

The last parts for me to retopologise were the feet and to connect it all together. Unlike the hands, the feet don't need as much detail as they will only deform with the bends of the foot itself. This means I won't need to add much detail into the toes and can reduce the polycount by almost merging them together and not retopologising between the gaps.

This then left the final part of retopology - connecting it all together. The hardest parts to connect were the arms to shoulders as I had chosen to pose my character in an A-pose which resulted in a small and difficult angle to retopologise the armpits. As well as this, the armpits will move with arm movement and so they need additional edge loops for more seamless deformation. To do this, I again used some common retopology patterns to retain quads while increasing the poly count to allow for the arm movement to look natural.

With the retopology done, I could close my BSurfaces, Shrinkwrap and Mirror modifiers and shade the final model smooth. While this made the overall model look much better, it did make some of the facial features like the mouth look unnatural. To counter this, I selected certain edges of the face (particularly on the mouth, eyes and ears) and made them sharp. This made the face look much more natural and less blurred together.

And with that, the retopology is complete! I'm left with a finished body mesh consisting of roughly 20k tris! This is (in my opinion) a great number of triangles for a full body mesh, especially considering the sculpted model had 1.25 million. This number however, is subject to change. The character still needs hair for starters and if I go ahead with making blendshaped facial expressions then the poly count will increase with the addition of teeth, tongue and eyebrows too.

As well as this, the overall poly count could have been decreased slightly too. The major areas sticking out to me would be the head, hands and feet. To help me retopologise the head, I followed an online tutorial as I was going, but with my new knowledge after finishing the whole model, I realise I could have majorly decreased the poly count on the head itself as it won't be deforming other than around the neck. The same goes for the hands and feet. I think I could have improved on the fingertips and toes by reducing their poly count without affecting the deformation.

For now though, I'm happy with how the mesh has turned out! I thought that I hated the retopology progress having hated it in my last project but I can confidently say that with more experience and understanding, it has become much more bearable haha.

Now that the retopology is done, I'm at a crossroads of what to do next. 😅 I'll be using the time over Christmas to organise my files and figure out the process from here.

Stay tuned! :3