Bandit Fixing Part 1 of 3 (Retopology) Reflection

What did you do this week?

What I undertook this week was fixing and prepping Krishnan's automatically retopologized sculpts from ZBrush of the bandits for our game. I did this by first assessing what needed adjusting and altering before going ahead with a rigging workflow that'd work best for quickly and efficiently bashing out 3D animations!

What was I pleased with?

Something that left me feeling pleased in my 3D modeling abilities was remembering all the practices and hotkeys that go into fixing a model in Blender. One method that as effective as it is satisfying is the "remove doubles" tool, which detects any and all overlapping vertices that could've been created by the automated retopology system in ZBrush, and merges them in place! Another thing I was really pleased with was getting the model to be symmetrical along the Y-axis, which was actually a lot simpler than I thought, what with the existence of mirror modifier as well as the clipping

What have I learned?

This task was certainly a trial and error scenario in getting this character, as well as the clothes modeled separately, to share the same location, rotation and scale when making alterations to the mesh.
I also developed a critical skill in giving constructive feedback this week. This happened when I told Krishnan that the clothes couldn't just be the autonomously low-resolution versions of his sculpts, as, for one the mesh was clipping with the main body underneath it.

What would I do next time?


Looking back over the week, I feel instead of getting Krishnan to retopologize the clothes in ZBrush just like he did with the mesh underneath, I could've done it myself in Blender using the shrinkwrap modifier. Of course, this would've meant essentially modeling over the original mesh, which could've lost a lot of the sculpt detail, but it would've given me more creative freedom and understanding of the mesh since I essentially created it upon Krishnan's foundation.