This week, we had a lecture on retopology. Due to high resolution on a mesh when sculpting, this makes animating the object almost. Retopology is adding faces back onto the mesh in a lower resolution.
By making the selected object live and selecting quad draw in Maya, I started retopologizing Henry’s elephant model. I learned that placing four vertices and selecting shift creates a square on the mesh and selecting tab and dragging an edge creates another square beside the previous. Around the eyes and mouth, I created smaller squares as these would be areas that move the most when animating a character. I tired to create loops throughout the mesh so they polygons would flow into each well and the face could move without any issues when animated. I found retopology very relaxing and am excited to start on my own character.
I also began creating my gnome this week. I began by creating the gnome’s torso, legs and feet in Maya as I found it easier to block out the basic shape there than in blender without adding toom much detail in the beginning. I created a sphere and extruded a loop of faces to create the top shape, then widened 2 cylinders at the top to create the legs. I then exported the body as an FBX and imported the file into blender.
In blender, I started by blocking out the head, nose, hat, and arms, then modelled them into their basic shapes. To make modelling the arms easier, Mike told me to put them straight out and model them so there were no mistakes with the shape of the mesh. I created a bend in the right arm where the gnome would be doing the ‘hold on a minute’ hand gesture.
