3D Toolkit - Retopology & UV Work

 

Retopology & UV Work

This blog is now the 2nd part of my process when it came to making my character design for my final submission that was due on the 18th of May by starting the process discussing the retopology and the UV unwrapping side of this project.

Another Youtube Video of the process of my retopology and UV process

Retopology Process

After finalising the sculpting process inside of Zbrush , I used the decimate tool inside of Zbrush to lower my poly count before going over and importing over in maya after using the decimation tool , my poly count went from the original 1.6 million polys to only 240k polys which was a good step in the right direction before taking it inside of maya and retopologising.

After exporting my sculpt as an obj file and moving it over to the maya software , I started working on the retopology step of making my final character by using a tool that is inside of maya called Retopologise which would be able to automatically retop sections of your model by selecting a desired amount of polygons for example my bandages around my characters chest was originally around 30k polys which was really unneeded for the small piece of clothing which I used the retoplogize tool and change it to go down to around 2k polys without losing detail . I decided on using this tool instead of going through the process of using quad draw and overlaying the new polygons over the old model as I originally tested with this however with my experience it was clipping through the old model and not working as intended.

However whilst the retologize automatic tool is a good tool to use inside the maya program it has its downsize when being used as in my case the head piece started at around 50k and ended up being around 11k by the end of it as due to the smaller markings and the ears the detail would vanish if I started to go lower than around 11k poly so I had to keep that at that benchmark however if I did go using the quad-draw tool inside of maya I could have possibly got it lower than 11k polys.

Model after Retopology process

UV Unwrapping process

Once the models retopology has been finished , the next step process is to start manually making the UVs and seams all along the model as inside maya there is an automatic tool inside of maya however when I used it along the entire model , it would cause the model to break and cause textures to be laid on the model broken which was not what I wanted with my final character design.

Example of Automatic Unwrap compared to Manual

To start the process I started by creating a planar UV to display the model at a side view then slowly work around the entire model segment by segment such as making the head a seperate piece same with the clothes and body all to make the process work smoother

Planar Cloth UV

Showcase on how the UV looks in a planar view

To start working on each model separately , I had to start by making each model have its own set of seams and allow the model to be broken apart into different segments by using the tool inside the UV section of the maya software called the UV cut and sew tool however when it comes with the case of seams I tried to effective hide most of them to allow the texture to not break or not link but if it was a more shaded model however with my model being primarily solid colours with limited shading on being on certain areas that was an issue I would not really run into however if the design had shaded areas it would have been a harder case to deal with placing the seams.

After placing all the separate seams for each model , I started by unwrapping all the UVs and placing each model into their own separate UV board which made importing them into substance painter and exporting them back out to place them onto the maya model more effective however was more time consuming.

Issues with the Seams

Whilst working on placing the seams I ran into multiple issues such as during my first few attempts of placing the seams on the model and then importing them into Zbrush I originally started by importing the whole model into the software I was using for textures which was Substance Painter and painting over the top however due to the multiple pieces on my model on the leg area such as the back fins and the cloth somehow managed to scatter the texture to the wrong areas so I changed how I would paint the textures and imported each individual piece with new seams and painted them all individual ready to be replaced back onto the maya model once all the separate textures were done.

My Model being in the Process of  having seams worked on