This week has been a bit of a challenge in terms of working on this project; I finished the topology quite quickly, and actually found this therapeutic! This is the completed topo:
I thought it turned out pretty well, and there were not a lot of mistakes in terms of loose vertices! I managed to get them all sorted by merging the verts and had no issues in that respect.
I had some issues with the UV unwrap, this is the initial attempt that I had:
I struggled a lot with the backpack and the lantern, and I gave it a good try but I needed to ask for help – Henry was lovely enough to send me a tutorial video and sent me some suggestions. I watched and followed this, and studied the files that he sent me back to view all of the seams he made. UV unwrapping these has given me a huge amount of confidence with UV mapping now – I feel like I’m really starting to understand how it works. The border of lantern continued to give me issues, and Mike showed me that I should be dividing this up into smaller sections, and suggested I do the same with the staff body in order to get more resolution. These are the current UV maps after the assistance:
I split gus into two materials, his skin and then his clothing, just to try and get as much resolution as I could for each.
So, finally, after a bit of poking and prodding I got the UV’s finished and was able to bring the character into substance painter. I ended up having to pull in an old version of the hoodie, as I pulled the length of it down and hadn’t realised this would affect the way mesh baking would effect the model. I brought in the high poly models of the tail, ears and hands as they were slightly effected by some strange textures after baking. I conformed all of the corresponding parts of the low poly mesh to the high poly mesh and this seemed to work fine:
I’m overall pretty happy with how these are looking! There are certain parts with Gus’ mesh that I’m still on the fence about, and am going to ask for advice tomorrow in class!