When we were making our models, we were told not to add too much detail initially, and this made the retopology process a lot easier. However, if we’d want to add some more detail for our model, we’d have to add a multiresolution modifier and bake normal maps.
I didn’t have my elephant retopology work on my laptop as I had finished it on my computer at home, however thankfully the teacher’s retopologised elephant model was on Blackboard for us to download and use this class.
The multiresolution modifier allows us to add detail by subdividing the surface in sculpt mode, but you can go between level viewports whenever you like while the sculpt still retains the information. When you subdivide the model it looks like this when you turn on the wireframe, although when you move around the program it lowers the amount of faces you see.
My first attempt was rather unsuccessful, although I wasn’t too surprised as I tend to have bad luck when working in Blender. The ears had a graphical error and I couldn’t get rid of it, so I started over.
I attempted to make the elephant again, and actually got relatively far, however;
When I tried to apply ambient occlusion, it ended in this nightmare.
Out of curiosity I tried to import this model into Blender, but it started completely falling apart and breaking before my very eyes. Do not recommend.
So I tried it again.
I think part of what messed me up in my previous attempts might have been that I was actually grabbing the model and moving things around, which I only now realised that I cannot do. I’m not sure if it’s what caused the initial problems, but either way once I tried to add some detail without using any grab brushes, things ended up starting to actually work.
I went through the same process of opening the shader editor, adding an image texture and then opening the image in another window, then changing the render engine to cycles, ticking “Bake from Multires”, and pressing bake. Thankfully the normal map worked alright, but I was worried about how it would handle the ambient occlusion map.
I saved the image texture as a png, went into viewport shading mode, removed the nodes that weren’t needed and added a normal map node. After I connected normal to normal and colour to colour, the normal map was working!
I took note of the fact that ambient occlusion seemed to be working the most weirdly in areas of the mesh that were heavily edited, so I took note of that for when I’d be editing my assignment model later on. That could just be the way that the render engine was working but I wanted to be careful anyway, taking into account my previous experience with this.
THANKFULLY, this time around the ambient occlusion map actually worked properly!! I applied the multiresolution modifier and exported the model as an fbx file, making sure to apply transform and limit to selected objects.
Again very thankfully, the elephant opened properly in substance painter! I had had issues with it before back when I was creating my helmet, so it was refreshing to actually have things work this time.
The ambient occlusion wasn’t showing well so I created a fill layer, made it a soft light layer and turned down the opacity until I had the amount of shading that I wanted.
Unfortunately, graphical errors were still appearing. I think it might just be the quality of my laptop that needs upgrading. However, despite these, thankfully strokes were still registering.
I didn’t go too detailed on this as I mostly wanted to test things out, however when I imported everything in from substance, it was thankfully working! I was a little worried for when I would have to texture my minotaur, as I would have to do it on my laptop, however it was nice to get some insight into what I would be dealing with.
So later, I went and started repeating the process with my model for my assignment.
Generally the model was looking okay, except for some graphical errors due to the way I had retopologised it.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to fix them at this stage, and when I tried to fix them it would cause more problems, so I had to leave them for now. However I took note of them in case I’d want to make another model in the future.
I started going in and adding details to the clothes first, making sure I remembered to add the character’s pocket on the shirt.
It was a little difficult to create a fur effect without actually grabbing or dragging the mesh, but I managed somehow. I particularly likes the way the effect turned out near the hooves.
I found working on the arm fur a little more difficult, probably because the fur would generally work differently in that area.
I ended up figuring something out eventually though. I also added some fur details to the ear and back of the head.
I was previously planning to add hair tufts to the head, but I realised if I wanted to do this effectively it should have been a more defined shape to retopologise. So I ended up just doing a few minor hair/fur details on the head. I also added some indents to the horns to make them look a little bit more realistic. I also added a multiresolution modifier to the eyes and added some detail to those as well.
Instead of applying the modifiers to the model this time around, I simply hid them instead, and repeated the process with the elephant of creating normal and ambient occlusion maps for my model.
Thankfully things ended up working out!
(My normal map is called “khgkg” because I had to redo it a few times and when I tried to rename it to “Minotaur_NM” it would glitch the map so… I had to leave it like that)
Now, despite the fact that I had made the eyes separately, I tried my best to make this work as I wanted to be able to texture them in substance painter too.
Thankfully, when I tried applying the normal map from the full model, it ended up working!
… Ambient occlusion did not, however, so I ended up leaving that out and just exported the fbx of these eyes with the normal map.
I did a very quick and lazy drawover of the eyes just to test if this would work.
… It did not.
So what I tried next was exporting both the model and eyes as an fbx together.
Thankfully, this ended up working, at least mostly. The first time around I exported the fbx as “limit to selected objects”, and the eyelids ended up looking grey like this and I could only select the eyes.
I went back and tried to this time “limit to visible objects” and it seemed to be working a little better! It was still being a little weird, for example it would either only let me edit the main body, or the eyes, however once I was able to edit the body I decided to focus on that first and worry about the eyes later.
Because I really badly didn’t want to waste a lot of time trying this if it wouldn’t work, though, I decided to test it first.
When I exported the textures, I noticed that there were double the amount of textures that I thought there would be, though I figured this is probably because of the eye mesh also being there.
But otherwise the textures I put on the character ended up working in Blender well! The normal map was being a bit weird but thankfully when I used the one I had originally exported from Blender, that ended up working.
So I went on to try to actually properly colour my character.
My laptop was still making things a bit of a nightmare, but I managed to create something that looked decent when put into Blender.
The eyes didn’t end up working the way i wanted them to after all, so I decided to go the old-fashioned way and colour them by applying materials to the faces in blender. Thankfully I had done the retopo for them in a way that allowed this.
The model had turned out a tiny bit shinier than I had anticipated, however it was really satisfying to finally see this model become a “real” thing with textures applied to it!