For my most recent project I wanted to try my hand at the sculpt -> retopology ->normal bake process. So far I have finished the sculpt and the retopology. The sculpt is one of my first and I used Sculptris after creating a base mesh in blender. This is also my first retopology, as you can probably tell :o. I tried to look around some forums and such, but I couldn’t seem to find any good advice on poly count ranges. This model is just going to be for posing, and maybe a short animation, so I’m not trying to make it too low poly. I am concerned that the current 12,508 faces is a bit high, but I’m really not too sure.
I’m assuming that my topology has some pretty significant flaws, so I would love some suggestions or advice before I move forward.
Thanks for any critiques, and sorry for the quality of the pictures, its also the first time I’ve tried a wireframe render.
Here are three different views of the topology.
I didn’t mean to double post, but I wasn’t allowed to post more than 3 pictures in the first post. I apologize if this isn’t the right protocol.
before continuing to read warning I’m a newbie at everything 3d
I am concerned that the current 12,508 faces is a bit high, <—depends on your computer and how much time you want to spend rendering.
You should be careful with the use of poles where there is going to be movement in the object as it will make it harder to rig properly and could cause artefacts.
As you can see no strange patterns, not many poles and the ones that exists are strategically placed, the quads are evenly sized and spaced.
I once read that you don’t really have to understand much about topology but if the topology looks clean then it is probably a good topology.
To see if your model can do the things you want from it (In short) play around with the model to see if it is able to do the things you want it to do if not then you will have to redo the re-topology
(more lengthy) You could e.g for the legs, in the edit mode, set the pivot point to 3d cursor, and place the cursor where the leg is supposed to bend and “mark” the vertices that should follow when you bend and use the rotate function to bend and then you can see if the model behaves the way you want it (if it deforms strangely or artefacts appears.
Anyways my models topology is as messy as yours if not worse and sometimes they work nicely for what is intended and sometimes I just have to redo it or quit, but the latter is not an option
Thanks for the ideas. oOErikOo, thanks for that link. I think I tried to make it a bit complex and in the end just made it messy, the picture in the link shows how nice and flow-y it should be. I’ll try to work on smoothing out the topology, then I’ll bake the sculpt normals.
Well now this is strange. I’ve only baked normals a few times, but I have yet to see this happen before. One huge issue is small triangles in the normal map that don’t seem to be calculating correctly at all. Then there is some weird stretching from some of the UV islands to the bottom left corner.
Lastly, I didn’t sculpt the mouth in the high poly model, but I did open it up in the lower poly model, the normal map inside the map looks like its going crazy. Is there a way to not have the normal map effect that?
I’ll keep messing around with this, but is anyone familiar with any of these issues?
edit: After messing with some things and re-baking a few times (to the same effect), It looks like the baking process, adding triangles then smoothing the color along the gradient, isn’t finishing completely, leaving some random triangles unsmoothed. Could my computer be running out of memory or something?
I had a similar problem with the little triangles on the normal map. Check that your model is completely symmetrical, or it goes crazy trying to work out which side to use and you get messy triangles.
Hmm, That’s interesting. I still have the mirror modifier on it, so I think it has to be symmetrical, but I wonder if having the mirror still not applied is causing some error.
Well… The good news is that I got the normal map to work. The bad news is that I have no idea what actually fixed the problem. I got a new computer (finally) this week, and after setting it up, re-installing blender (a different build then before), and trying the same process again, the normal map came through perfectly.
Well I was about to post the mediocre progress I made on texturing now that I got the normal map working and I can’t seem to find any of the image textures I made (and saved) in the last two hours. Of course the blend file can’t find them either…
try doing a search within the directory you think you saved it in, if you recall the name of the file. there should be some options at the top of the folder header.
Modron: I searched through every file with a “date modified” of 5/27 and they appear to not exist. I saved my new textures and doubled checked that it worked, so it was just a one time fluke or possibly human error somehow.
I redid my textures. As you can see I still need some (a lot of) practice with texture painting. I tried rendering with both BI and cycles to see what I liked best. It could just be the quick setup, but the cycles render looks much nicer. I’m not sure if I want to try making a bump map next, try rigging, or just restart the process to get more practice. I know it’s not too good, so if anyone has some comments, critiques or advice, it would be well appreciated.
Here is another attempt at creature sculpting. Just a basic concept somewhere between a dinosaur and a chicken. I think I was mildly more successful than above, and it was much faster, which is a good thing. I’ll try texturing it next. I think I want to try integrating both scales (with bump and spec map, which are new to me), and feathers (also new to me). Due to the much greater separation between vertices in this model than the last, I think I may also try rigging as it shouldn’t be as much of a pain to vertex paint (if I even need to).
The first creature looks nice. But maybe it is a bit unbalanced. It looks static but it’s center of gravity seems to be forward, as if all its weight was resting in its front legs.
The texture could have benefited a bit more details, and the material, some shininess, for scales.
Topology seems good enough. As was said, most of it should follow muscle masses and natural edges (like large scales or exoskeleton for this kind of creature).
Overall, I think i turned out quite nice.
Regarding the problem with normals, i had some troubles making good maps with a mirror modifier. Sometimes, some faces from one side overwrite faces on the other side. I tried enabling mirror UV in the modifier but it didn’t change the problem. I ended up applying the mirror.
Not a huge fan of your chicken creature though. Proportions feel a bit weird. Huge head/beak, small feet. But it’s interessting to try and mix scales and feathers
Well it turns out I was missing a pretty big aspect of sculpting and texture painting…alpha maps (brush textures)! I always wondered how people were doing really really fine details in sculpts and paints. I think I was a bit overzealous in my bump mapping as I was as much just playing around as specifically focusing on what this character should look like. I had a bit of trouble getting the spec map to show up nicely in cycles, but I think it is just subtle. Let me know what you think.
On another note, I tried doing some downy feathers on the bird based on a tutorial at CGCookie, but it was pretty horrendous. I’ll work on it more before I post anything.
