In the past months i was only training sculpting, which i really like, but in the last month i was thinking "How on earth does someone retopo, how does someone creates a game ready asset?", and for me that was beyond my limit, something impossible to do basically, and that feeling was really depressing, i was talking about this with a discord friend and he recommended me one course from Udemy, "Stylized Character Creation for Games" from Abraham Leal.
The course teaches the whole workflow, sculpt/modeling -> retopo -> bake -> texture. So i decided to do it to take a look on how it works, and man what a difficult but awesome journey.
This is the concept:
I started with the sculpting, because it's the part the i have experience already.
The sculpting part i actually didn't followed the course, but did it by myself following the concept as well.
i spent almost a day sculpting the hair, it was my first time trying to make a stylized version and the shape didn't really helped me, i was happy with the final result.
With the sculpting part done, it was time to jump into Maya to model the props and get used with the software, in this part i followed the course every step because i was really lost.
There was a lot of props, i not only learned a lot of prop modeling in maya but even things that i used before like Zmodeler in zbrush makes a lot more sense now.
With the modeling done, it was time to start the part that i feared the most, Retopology, i never saw even a timelapse on how to actually do it, so i watched a couple of videos from flippednormals about it just to get used to it, and then i started mine with the help of the course.
Surprisingly it not THAT hard, but it's a lot of work, boring work, the model is asymmetrical too, making it harder.
Sorry about the photo, it's actually the only image that show the retopo process since i forgot to take screenshots, as you can see the chest was done for the last.
The body went from 1.43 Million to 12.4k polygons, when i finished it i felt so accomplished, that feeling i had before starting the course thinking doing something like this is impossible for someone like me vanished, i know a lot of mistakes were done, it may be not optimized and beautiful enough, but now i know it's actually possible to do it, and if i did, you can too.
Heres the final result from the retopo:
Bending it for fun and to see it there is any artifacts
With the UV done i jumped into SP to start texture the materials, heres a screenshot of the baking:
Baking results:
I was really surprised with the result, i though i would lose a lot of details after the retopo, baking is magical indeed.
I have and observation about using SP, it's actually painful to use it with a tablet, i don't know why there's not a zbrush nav preset in it, it would be awesome for handpainted details, i ended up using the mouse and didn't added any hand paint touches sadly, but i liked the results:
Marmoset was the render engine of choice from the course, so i gave it a try and really liked it, i will probably replace keyshot with it, but i have to do some test and research for high poly stuff:
And that's it for the course, but i wanted to go full in in the game ready aspect, so i watched a few tutorials on rigging in youtube to get it done, and here it is! Fully rigged!
The course teaches the whole workflow, sculpt/modeling -> retopo -> bake -> texture. So i decided to do it to take a look on how it works, and man what a difficult but awesome journey.
This is the concept:
I started with the sculpting, because it's the part the i have experience already.
The sculpting part i actually didn't followed the course, but did it by myself following the concept as well.
i spent almost a day sculpting the hair, it was my first time trying to make a stylized version and the shape didn't really helped me, i was happy with the final result.
With the sculpting part done, it was time to jump into Maya to model the props and get used with the software, in this part i followed the course every step because i was really lost.
There was a lot of props, i not only learned a lot of prop modeling in maya but even things that i used before like Zmodeler in zbrush makes a lot more sense now.
With the modeling done, it was time to start the part that i feared the most, Retopology, i never saw even a timelapse on how to actually do it, so i watched a couple of videos from flippednormals about it just to get used to it, and then i started mine with the help of the course.
Surprisingly it not THAT hard, but it's a lot of work, boring work, the model is asymmetrical too, making it harder.
Sorry about the photo, it's actually the only image that show the retopo process since i forgot to take screenshots, as you can see the chest was done for the last.
The body went from 1.43 Million to 12.4k polygons, when i finished it i felt so accomplished, that feeling i had before starting the course thinking doing something like this is impossible for someone like me vanished, i know a lot of mistakes were done, it may be not optimized and beautiful enough, but now i know it's actually possible to do it, and if i did, you can too.
Heres the final result from the retopo:
Bending it for fun and to see it there is any artifacts
With the UV done i jumped into SP to start texture the materials, heres a screenshot of the baking:
Baking results:
I was really surprised with the result, i though i would lose a lot of details after the retopo, baking is magical indeed.
I have and observation about using SP, it's actually painful to use it with a tablet, i don't know why there's not a zbrush nav preset in it, it would be awesome for handpainted details, i ended up using the mouse and didn't added any hand paint touches sadly, but i liked the results:
Marmoset was the render engine of choice from the course, so i gave it a try and really liked it, i will probably replace keyshot with it, but i have to do some test and research for high poly stuff:
And that's it for the course, but i wanted to go full in in the game ready aspect, so i watched a few tutorials on rigging in youtube to get it done, and here it is! Fully rigged!
