I’ve had this hi-res sculpt sitting around for quite some time now, and I’m finishing it as an exercise in workflow (Sculpt > RetopoFlow > Substance Designer/Painter > Rigify > Unreal Engine 4).
Sculpting was done in Blender, retopo will be done using CG Cookie’s RetopoFlow add-on, and texturing will be done in Substance.
For anyone that’s curious, my greater goal here is to provide the Creepypasta fandom with a high-quality public domain asset for their film and game projects.
Here’s my first try at RetopoFlow with the Polystrips, Contours, and Tweak tools. First impressions: this add-on is absolutely worth the purchase price.
Thanks for the input. I suppose if I intend for this to be embraced by the fandom, I will definitely have to add physical tentacles, though they’ll be done last, after I achieve my other goals here. Personally, I’ve always hated the idea of physical (or even visible) tentacles extending from his back, and my original intention was to make the tentacles only show up in his shadow.
I guess I’ve already made a lot of deliberate departures from “canon” as it is, so I’ll probably make my preferred vision for the character first, and then work on an alternate that is more friendly to the existing lore. I do want people to use it, after all!
Tonight’s work: Attempted to use Polystrips for the hand, but it doesn’t seem to like convoluted surfaces much (especially not these super wrinkly hands). I was able to use Contours and Tweak to do the fingers, though, and will be doing some more manual modeling on the protruding bones later.
Tweak was also super useful for adjusting the flow of the palm topology. It lets you push vertices around or relax them as though you’re in sculpt mode, all while staying in edit mode and shrinkwrapping the topology to the reference model. Cool stuff!
Reworked the hands a lot. Better anatomy, cleaner flow, more consistent face density (at least I think so… the finger joints could probably use some slight cleanup, but I’ve been staring at it for too long at this point…).
Also, if you’re annoyed by the way Blender overlays wireframes poorly in object mode (with missing edges, such as in the previous screenshot) I figured out a better way to screenshot wireframes: go into edit mode, and disable “faces” in the Overlays section under Mesh Display. All of the edges will now render properly. Depending on the scale of your mesh, you’ll also need to adjust the clipping range to have a slightly higher start point than the default (I set mine to .25), which somehow prevents occluded wires from showing through the thinner parts of the mesh. I don’t know why this works.
