Best way to retopo this?

Tom Ellis

Hey all,

Having some serious problems trying to figure out the best way to retopologize this jacket.

The problem is that the lapels and collar come like inside out if you see what I mean and I'd like to keep them one mesh to avoid seams. Although even if I did do it separately I'm still not sure how best to go about it.

Normally I'd probably flatten the lapel down and just retopo over the top of them, but there's gonna be a strap/chain that goes under the lapel so it needs to be off the chest some.

Tom Ellis

Ah I sorted it. I retopo'd most of it over the sculpt and the attached the collar from the base mesh I had used originally. It was a nightmare to UV but a test bake turned out pretty nice.

ZacD

why was it so hard to retopo? Just zbrush tools? Doesn't seem to bad.

Tom Ellis

I'm not sure really, it's hard to explain the exact issues I was having but it was just the way the collar had to be two sided and the way it folds round from inside to out.

Also I think I was thinking about how I was going to UV it at the same time which wasn't helping. Obviously the main jacket part was straightforward, just figuring out the best way to do the collar and have it flowing into the rest of the mesh which was confusing me.

Ruz

yeah the way the jacket collars go inside out is a real pain in the butt

felipefrango

I had the same issue with a character I'm working on at the moment and I'm not really sure I solved it the best way. Can you show some pics of how you did it?

Tom Ellis

Yeah it wasn't the easiest thing to model that's for sure. And I still don't know if I've done it the best way. It's the sort of thing you look at and think, yeah easy, then come to do it and be like 'ooh ook, how?!!?'.

I figured the key problem area was the fact the collar ran all the way down to the bottom of the jacket which meant the edge loops ran all the way around the base, up the zipper area and around the collar.

So I figured I could just retopo over the zipper area flat since it would be closed anyway, then built the collar out from where the polys start to separate up near the chest, then just extruded and folded them round.

I'll prewarn you though retopo is only half the nightmare. UV'ing it is when the real fun begins!

I only took a quick screenshot as I posted another topic on how I might go about UV'ing it, here's the screenshot:



You can't really see it that well but I posted the OBJ in my other thread if you wanna take a closer look.

felipefrango

Oh yeah, I hear ya man, Ive started texturing it yesterday, it was a pain in the ass to unwrap. But yeah, it looks a lot like what I did, but yours seem to be even trickier, my coat was open so I didn't have to worry about zippers.