Retopology
My retopology was a nightmare.
I had brought my high-res model into blender and started retopologising I was chugging along in it because it was much more difficult than I originally imagined because of the spikes along his body. I had dynameshed it all together instead of keeping the spikes separate and retopologizing them separately.
This is how far I got in retopologizing.
I will not make this mistake again if I ever do a spikey creature again.
Henry gave me some advice to use the zremesher tool on Zbrush because it would be much faster than doing it clunkily in blender, and so I did. It worked really well, and there weren’t many issues. At this point in time, I opted to get rid of the loincloth because I thought it was really ugly when it came to texturing, so I instead covered his bottom half in fur.
Once I had this and I added a few extra details, such as using the rake tool to create some indents where I wanted to texture scarring, I was ready to start texturing.
Texturing
My texturing was also challenging, but in different ways to my retopology. I couldn’t settle on a good colour scheme to go with; originally I made his colour scheme very dark, but it wasn’t working out because I didn’t feel there was enough contrast, and he just ended up looking very bland.
So I went back to my original concept drawing for the minotaur to get the right colours, and I got a colour scheme closer to what I had envisioned in my head.
Whenever I was doing the texturing, I wanted to add some cool effects, and I decided to add glowing green cracks because his environment is a place where nuclear waste is buried, so I thought it would make sense and look cool. I actually thought adding the glowing effect was quite easy, as I found a simple tutorial that I was able to follow along with.
I really love the textures I got on him, but I am going to change the texture of the eyes because I don’t think that they really go. Originally, I thought that the green would go with the glowing green spikes, but I think a darker mudder brown would compliment the overall colour scheme better.
Rigging
Rigging was actually the aspect of this project that gave me the least amount of bother. I think the fact that my creature was humanoid really benefitted me, as I was able to use automatic weights with only a few tweaks in weight painting, which really helped speed up my pipeline and helped me get into Unreal a bit earlier than I had envisioned, which was great.
I went for this kind of pose because it was meant to be slightly more aggressive, like I originally intended, and I think once I get him into unreal and get the lighting, how I envision. So far, I’m really loving how everything is coming together.
I tried for a while to weight paint the cuffs and eyes so they wouldn’t deform strangely but eventually I realised it was much easier to parent them.