Re-meshing, retopology ready for animation.

So good news and bad news this week, bad news first, I have not completed everything that i planned to do, I wanted to have the retopology finished, the UV's unwrapped and the normals baked, however that has not happened, I ran into some trouble during the retopology phase which set me back a fair bit. my initial thought was that I could leave all the retopology up to Zbrushes own bit of software called Z-Remesher, however what I tried this on the entire model it did not work as planned, after setting out the guidelines for how I wanted the topology to flow and how many polys I wanted the software to get as close as possible to, Z-Remesher decided to ignore all this information and do what it wanted, resulting in a over budget poly count and terrible topology for animation.

Onwards to the good news however, my saving grace was in Scott Spencer's Zbrush Digital Sculpting, during Chapter 8 Scott Spencer defines why retopology is so important during the modelling pipeline and goes on to talk about Zbrushes retopology tools, the one he goes into most detail about and uses to retopologize his model, is the system that uses Zspheres to define faces one vertex at a time.

This method was the method that I decided to use when retopologizing the face, and I will continue to use it for the arms and hands as well, I found that using this method was a much more controlled and manual intensive way of retopologizing your model, however I found this to give the best results when it comes to defining your topology.

Here is a render of my model during the retopology phase:

As you can see with the above image I have even topology flow around the eyes and mouth to allow even distribution when animation occurs. 

Here is the model after I had finished the retopology process: 

Head Poly Count - 2410

Due to me setting out the topology guides using Zspheres, you can see that the model has a nice flow of even topology around the eyes and mouth allowing for high quality animation.

Here are the other objects that I currently have retopologized:

Poly Count - 336

Poly Count - 1956

Poly Count - 1085

The T-shirt and Trousers were both retopologized using Z-Remesher which is why the flow of topology is off, I plan to set out the faces in a more animation friendly flow when i export the model to 3DSMax in the coming week. 

My plan for next week is as follows - Finish the remaining retopologizing (Boots and arms), Unwrap the UV's and bake the normals. I will also redo my timeline for this project as I have now fallen behind by 2 weeks due to these unforeseen circumstances.  

-J.W

Bibliography:

Scott Spencer. (2010). Remeshing. In: Scott, S, Eric, K and Paul, G.Zbrush Digital Sculpting, Human Anatomy. Canada: Wiley Publishing Inc. p266-279.