Just a fair warning, I am pretty bad at modelling, especially organic objects.
I am working on a video game parody animation as a way to improve my skills and better understand 3D art in games. However, the game model I am working used texture swapping on the eyes and mouth to provide different facial expressions, rather than shape keys or bones. Even worse, the eyes were all triangles with no correlation to the eye texture, meaning if I wanted to add eyeballs and animate with shape keys, my best bet was to extract the eyes from the model and retopo them the way I would like to animate them (though I struggled a bit with the eyelids at the joints).
The problem I have now is that my retopo has non-planar faces, which means I get triangle artifacts when doing a quick test render. I then tried baking the normals from the original to my retopo but that did not solve the problem either. It is awkward because I am trying to create a higher res mesh over a lower res, and since the eyes are so big and the top eyelid is really just an eyelash with stretchy skin, I need quite a few edge loops to animate the upper eyelid properly. Plus the character’s eyebrows rotate 90 degrees when blinking.
So the outer loop of vertices have to match the original so I can mend my retopo back into the mesh, but the inner vertices have to flow around the eyes so that I can properly animate them.
Can anyone tell me how I can improve my retopo to get rid of rendering artifacts and more closely match the original?
Here’s some screenshots of the issues I am having:
And this is what happens when I add the normal map.
And here are the blend files. The first is the retopo ready for editing. The second is with the mirror modifier applied where I was testing the rendering.
How do I get either of the second two retopos to look more like the first?
You’ve got way too many vertices and most of them aren’t needed. You should retopo a simple version and then add more geometry if it’s actually needed. I would start with something like this:
Cyaoeu: Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I’m going for a “what if these characters were in a CGI film” sort of parody, and I’ll be needing very expressive eyes in some close up shots. The eyelids collapse awkwardly, so I did need a lot of those edge loops to get accurate results. The rest were for pushing out the eyelids and eyebrows which I didn’t do because I wanted to make sure the rest of the topology checked out first.
RickyBlender: Wow! I was expecting my surface shape to go completely out of proportion with that tool. Instead I got significantly better normal map results and magnitudes smaller vertex displacement with respect to the distance between some of the tightly packed vertices in my retopo (30 dB for engineering minds), meaning I’ll be able to glue this back without much issue. I’m so impressed with this tool. Thank you so much for the tip!
For anyone else curious, I still have a couple of artifacts under the eyes under harsh lighting, but all the “wrinkliness” is gone, meaning worst comes to worst I can hide it with a “dirt” texture. The artifacts didn’t even show with a quick HDRI test, so I’m calling this solved. I might post a gif later of some facial animations once I glue things together and animate some shapes.
