Suction Cups…. Continued…
As I mentioned last week, I spent a lot of the time this week working on adding suction cups to the arms tentacles of my character. I definitely feel these turned out much better, as I did have a feel for how the array structure went, so I sorta optimised it to be a bit quicker. Also, unlike the legs, there wasn’t any sections with overlapping verts or deformed shapes, unlike the legs that had a plethera of messes that I couldn’t really fix.
The polycount it self was fine for what it was as the mesh was still sharp and detailed enough to resemble what I wanted, whilst 54k is not ideal, there is a lot of suction cups that need to be accounted for, so it was already impossible to make this really low poly considering the round shape of a suction cup. I will provide images below;
Retopology!!
Now before coming into retopology, I was already intimidated and frustrated due to the time it took for me to create and apply suction cups to the body of my character. I had heard from a friend that they used a mirror and welding strategy (in blender) to essentially weld new polygons, to the old shape whilst staying in different objects. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to work that method efficiently, so I went and researched into some addons that act like Maya’s Retopology Mode. It was at this point I was graced by the heavens: Retopoflow 3.
I had previously downloaded this addon to try and make use of it in a unit from last year (1st 3D character Unit) however, I couldn’t really get the grasp of how to use it, and therefore left it. But upon rediscovering it and watching some youtube tutorials on the basics for it; I was hooked. It managed to provide me with such an efficient working environment and workflow that retopology was honestly the easiest thing I had to do in this entire project, and was actually something I turned out to enjoy, as maybe listening to music whilst retopologising a model isn’t that bad after all. It still took a while, so this was done throughout Week 6 from here on out.
There were a few tools that I made extensive use out of, such as Strokes, Contours, Polypen, Knife and Relax. All of these have an essential purpose and areas of which they were more effective than others in the project, in particular Contours was incredible for the tentacles, as it creates an edgeloop around the model which then can be linked to another edge-loop at the click of a button. Polypen and Knife were useful for fixing topology issues, in which other cases I made use of the Loops tool to add an edge loop if something was off, before relaxing it with Relax and fixing it further.
It didn’t take nowhere near as long as I anticipated, and to some extent I am happy about that, but I also enjoyed it so much so I feel conflicted. I will make sure to do more projects like this one to keep retopologising, or just offering to retopologise my friends work. Alas, here is the final result compared to the sculpted one!
As you can notice, there is essentially no difference, the only thing being how blenders lighting affects the top part of the head, but it still has the same ridge that seperates it, and the same indent on the skin between the legs. Tentacles and Eyes look identical.
Here is the complete current pipeline of my character! From start to finish at the moment, but now is onto the other main parts of this project, such as UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and animation. Until Week 7!