Today we started to learn about retopology, and it was safe to say that I was dreading this area of 3D modelling.
For this we were given a file and instructed how to get started. I found a bit of an issue on the first pass of this so I restarted and got to work on it again and it went much better this time. It is a very time consuming process as I learnt, so during class time I didn’t get this task finished but I did get some of the face done. I found starting with the loops made it easier to connect the rest of the face up and I plan to finish this once I get home to practice further.
I left it a day and came back to it when I needed to relax, because I actually found this methodical repetitive work quite soothing. I did run into some issues where some verts would randomly happen in weird places and I fixed this by deleting them and checking over where this would have effected my model and fix any issues with the knife tool. Once I was finished I applied all my modifiers and extruded the mouth inward to create a mouth and throat and closed this off to complete the model. I then moved this retopologised elephant away from the sculpted model to compare them. [NOTE: In the second picture I did go back and fix up the n-gon seen]
Then I decided I wanted some more practice in unwrapping models so I went and applied my checker material instead of the red and got to projecting my UV. I rotated the plane sideways so that I could see the elephant a bit better in the UV window. I decided to mark seams around the ears, around the inner ear, around the nose, in the mouth and above and below the back of the head. I think I’m slowly getting better at this process but I still need a lot more practice in it before I would call myself good in it.
