Hello
This might be easy thing or even basics I’ve overlooked but at the moment I really don’t have time to figure it out by myself and deadline is hanging above my head like a grimm reaper lining up his scythe upon my neck before proceeding towards decapitation. Therefore I come to you. While direct solutions would be greately appreciated I will gladly take any kind of advice, guidance or source to learn from.
Long story short:
Until now I was mainly modelling organic and hard surface stuff for practice (mainly cars and furniture, but also some basic humanoid). I was fiddling with sculpting and retopology and now I’ve stumbled upon impenetrable wall for my newbie level. For my graduation project, which is short animation, I’ve selected Ki-44 - Japanese warbird of WW2 era, which I also wanted to use in game environment (so it has to be low poly). Now the problem is that this plane while on first glance looks pretty simple it actualy has some sophisticated shapes here and there. I’ve spent a lot of time to recreate it as accurately as I could - I’ve done it in pieces - engine cowling with radiator, front part of wing roots, upper part of fuselage, canopy, tail, rudder section. Problem begins where I need it as piece of one single geometry - never before I’ve needed that. I’ve figured out I would just subdivide it into space, align as best as I could and retopo it manualy - while number of polygons is now satisfactory I find my mesh being… terrible for several reasons. I have no clue how I should retouch my mesh to leave high density only where it’s needed. For example I have wing roots which have pretty curvy shape that’s not regular and changes a lot as fuselage go but the upper side of fuselage is pretty straighforward for the most part.
Here’s example of my multi-part fuselage aligned and start of creating new low poly mesh projected on high poly shape.
(nevermind the engine cowling, I forgot to apply transformations and now upon load it’s not tall enough but that’s not a problem. And yes, tail section is not finished yet)
For example I need to have my fuselage mesh more evenly spaced but since it has to be one piece of mesh so wing roots add a lot of vertical lines that while crucial to preserve wing root and nearby fuselage shape they are completely pointles for upper fuselage or tail for the most part. I have no idea how I should work this mesh out to lower it’s poly count and don’t mess it up, not to mention avoid ngons in some places.
So
-
Can I space my mesh more evenly in any other way than moving single verticies arround? (moving whole edges add just more work on top of already tedious task more often than not)
-
How should I approach to make smooth transitions between meshes of different density on my model without creating ugly surface or creating additional unnecessary loopcuts while stick to quads? Model most likely won’t be subdivided further since I have pretty tight polycount limit (arround 40-50k tris) (selected part with one interaction of subdivision has ~4k tris and it’s not yet mirrored on the other side).
-
Now I retopo this with face snapping projection manualy extruding individual verticies or whole edges which then I have to clean up vertex by vertex so edges are atleast remotely straight and follow the flow. Is there a way to speed up the process and create more straight lines and fluent curves? My current mesh is well worthy of a name of total disaster and tragedy.
At the end I would like to apologize for my English as my grammar probably made your eyes bleeding as well as if above questions aren’t worthy of a separate thread - brief search didn’t bring any satisfactory answers.
Thank you in advance,
Marrond
