This was my first introduction to the process of retopology and how you use it. Since I was not familiar with the process I wanted to practice it before I started on my own model. I used the practice elephant head model to try and get comfortable with retopology.

I did find it quite challenging at first, particularly at getting everything into neat loops. One problem I had in particular with this model was getting the ears to join in the middle. I struggled with this, as can be seen in the image below. However, once it was suggested to me that it is easier to work outwards from the center to get a circle I found the process to be a little easier.

I had the most success with the trunk area and the space around the mouth as I was able to get nice clean lines and to get the low poly mesh to fit well along the high poly mesh. It wasn’t perfect but once I was happy with how the low poly mesh looked on this project I moved onto retopologising my Whale Shark.

When I first started with the retopology of my whale shark, I struggled quite a bit. The mesh was very large and so started to over think the retopology. Some parts of the model I managed to get to a point where I was happy with it, such as the mouth. I was able to make a successful loop in the mouth area and around the chin which worked well. However, I found that the lines were much too condensed, especially around the back and along the fins. This was inconsistent and I felt like it wasn’t going to be very good for the poly count.

I used the relax tool to loosen up all of the areas which were too clumped together and it helped a lot. I was also able to turn off quad draw, go into edge mode and delete any edges which were unnessicary or that were causing Ngons (though thankfully there were only 2 which needed removed). I was much happier with the retopology of the model following this.

When I was happy with the Whale shark retopology, I looked at the secondary ray character. As it is a much simpler character, I decided to use the auto retopologize in Maya for this originally. Later on however, I had some time so I decided to go back and make an attempt at retopologising the ray character myself.

Despite the ray being a much smaller character I found it a lot trickier than the whale shark, possibly because of it’s shape. the basic shapes of the ray come down to triangles and so I found it quite hard to keep the loops consistent across the body. Some of the areas were alright but some of them where not fitting properly against the high poly mesh, particularly around the chin so i decided to delete it and start again.

The second attempt was a lot better as I was able to cover the mesh properly around the whole body. The loops around the eyes, fins and tail were also a lot better so I was pleased with this. I was able to find a wireframe of the ray from ‘Finding Nemo’ which was very helpful to me when it came to trying to retopologize my own character.