I I was rather nervous about the Retopology process because I wasn’t too sure on what it entailed. I followed along with class demonstrations but when applied to my own character I found it difficult. I had a lot of parts to my model that I wasn’t too sure where to begin but I wanted to keep some parts separate so the reto stage wouldn’t be too hard to do. I also made sure to watch videos relating to retopology to see what the best way to assign the meshes would be.

I began with the shoes>upward since it was the least looking daunting task (and the further away from the face, I won’t lie, the better I felt.) I inserted a plane, edge looped, deleted the other half of the face, mirrored, sized down and applied the snap tool and shrink wrap modifier. I offset the faces by 1 and this allowed for me to begin building the faces around my mesh. I ran into a strange issue whenever I tried and turned a corner the extrusion would glitch the vertices?

I was really confused as to why this was happening, but I messed around with my shrink modifier settings then tried turning off the below settings on the snap tool which solved the issue. I wasn’t entirely sure if the options for the snap were needed however the settings made it impossible to work with extrusion, so I turned them off.

Turns out, the further I went, this wasn’t the issue. I was literally just selecting too many vertices in the process and trying to adjust, making them all go out of place. Go figure!

Honestly when it came to the shoes it was more of a difficult process than I had originally imagined. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around retopology so when it came to the shoes there was too many bevels and faces that it got overly complicated trying to join them at bottom of the shoes. This took me a while, a lot of trial and error, to figure out. However, despite how hard it was to let go of so much work and wasted time, I dissolved all the edges, selected the edges at the bottom of the shoe and extruded/sized inward to allow for less faces and simple geometry. I also deleted some edges at the bottom when merging the points at the centre to ensure there were no triangles (couldn’t very well still have triangles, however this is something I’m still trying to grasp and hopefully pick up on these things with ease the more practise I get.)

Trousers:

I was watching along to the blackboard tutorials and found the method of using a cylinder to place my faces. As my trousers for my model was made out of cylinders I added loops to wherever I thought would need them and copied the modifiers over from the shoes. This was a godsent and freed up so much time instead of my mindless attempt at manually placing faces.

Going to reto trousers, then tailcoat, delete any unnecessary faces then re join. The legs and the tailcoat were too close so auto-merge kept having issues, so I found it easier to achieve this.

Coat:

I had trouble with the inner tailcoat. I merged the vertices for the tube fabric at the bottom and had no way to connect it to the remaining faces. I deleted the vertices and inserted another face in order to attach them. Another issue was when I was tracing over the faces from the other side to match the inner coat, I look at the outer coat and saw that the vertices kept merging due to the auto feature. I had to deleted the vertices that were merged and redid them to ensure that they were connected to the correct surface.

I then used a separate plane mesh and did around the colour, then joined the coat and the collar together to attach the vertices. I had to play around a long while until everything connect/matched up. I then scaled inward for the inner collar area, however I didn’t fill or connect the middle to make sure the polygon count was low.

Having to delete the faces that kept merging, having to keep adjusting the auto-merge tool in-between so this didn’t keep happening. I found the process extremely frustrating and had to keep going back to the goblin and elephant videos on blackboard to gain a visual reference on what to do. As I was using the mirror tool as well I had to adjust the middle section of the mirror as it kept overlapping, so I later applied the mirror modifier and manually joined any vertices to form a single shape. I would sometimes use the auto-merge in the mirror settings to fix this issue but I was determined to go in and merge these vertices myself, for the most part the auto merge being a bit unreliable.

I later found a issue regarding the inner tailcoat, it seemed to have what I can only describe as a glitch where it seemed one vertices was stretching far past the model at a sharp point. I went back and found that there were a lot of double vertices where I would grab one corner and stretch it, showing there were extras that wasn’t allowing the faces to connect. I had to manually go through each one and saw there were dark shadowed faces that would glitch when I would zoom in and turn the camera. This wouldn’t appear until I shaded smooth and it brought a lot of issues to the surface with my reto, especially the collar blazer, other arm and tailcoat areas.

Trouble shooting:

https://all3dp.com/2/blender-remove-doubles-how-to-remove-double-vertices/

Why is shade smooth causing strange shadows? How can I fix this? from blender

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/146825/dark-after-shade-smooth

I tried to use the merge normals shortcut and this somewhat solved the issue, however I decided to manually click through and dissolve my vertices until I found the problem, redid the faces and this made the issue with the tailcoat disappear.

Kept hiding the upper coat to see if the joining part between the legs and the coat overlapped. I wanted to ensure there were no gaps between the faces I was placing. I’m kind of glad I did the reto process like this because I felt like these closer sections would have caused my a lot of bother.

Head:

To begin the head I used the cylinder trick on the neck and shrink wrapped, deleting the top and bottom faces as this couldn’t be seen. I later found it was harder to join these up when manually going in to the face details so I decided to delete this object and manually do the neck when it came to that stage.

WingsL used the elephant ear technique. Essentially manually placed the faces and when it came to joining in the middle I extruded and scaled inward. Tried to turn middle triangles into quads, I’m still not very well versed in the visual difference although I do know the importance of this step. I feel like I still need to become better at this process to improve my models. Another thing I found that I kept doing was switching between having the auto snap on and off to better reto certain shapes (this came into play mostly with the tentacle stages so I could wrap the cylinders around the shapes better) but I had to keep going back, undoing work and switching it back on so the geometry wasn’t messed up in between. This was another frustrating process but it allowed me to better work with the tools and hopefully I grow more into the habit of ensuring my tools are in the correct settings before moving on.

I could’ve kept the cheekbones as a hard surface shape too as I wanted the cheekbones to form a angular shape, however I went into and sculpted them because I thought I had the freedom to. I’m glad to go through this process however, if everything were to go perfect the first time around I wouldn’t have the ability or knowledge to solve issues that arise so I kept pushing on. I slowly began to realize my distaste for reto, and although I thought it was going well manually placing my faces I didn’t make things easy for myself by not ensuring the symmetry of my character was correct and not bringing issues to my tutors attention. During these early stages I was sure that I could handle these issues on my own because I went through similar steps during the last assignment, but I was very wrong and my work suffered in the process.

Cheekbones! I didn’t bother to reto the none-facing sides as they wouldn’t be visible.

Eyebrows. I joined these shapes and didn’t bother to reto them separately as they were structured simply enough to manually place my faces without many issues. I kept in mind where to place my faces in correspondence to the objects curves. I had to adjust the vertices here in the middle to ensure they were joined properly and not overlapping too, same as before with my tailcoat.

Hand Reto below. Another issue I kept having was trying to get the faces to be even and join together around a object. I had to think carefully about the placement of my faces and if they could properly wrap around my objects.

Starting the face I carefully looked to the goblin and elephant tutorial videos. I also looked to resources on youtube to ensure I got the basics down before fully going into the head sculpt as I felt this would be hard to achieve regarding joining faces and the detailed curves.

Grant and his respected retopology series. This helped me visualise the faces placements and techniques to help calm my previous worry of ensuring they connect:

Moving onto the face based off of my knowledge. I don’t know why I found this process to be the most daunting as I was avoiding it until the last stages, I believe it’s because I gave my model 4 eyes and needed to ensure the faces looped round each respectfully. When it came to the second set of eyes I ensured that the faces got smaller and joined on the inside, replicating the same technique as below. The face ended up being fine in the end when I found a steady workflow and pattern to follow.

Tentacles, using cyclinder and shrink wrap method. Only issue with this method was mainly having to apply the modifiers (shrink and mirror) to each object separately and adjusting the settings each time which was a little tedious but it also ensured that vertices weren’t snapping where they weren’t supposed to. With this stage also came deleting the faces (from the cylinder mesh) and merging vertices at centre to join objects at the middle.

Again, retopologising and keeping the base shape in mind.

Creating a hard surface shell, as said before I sculpted the previous ones and it made more sense to me to keep these as hard surface. I was going through my objects and ensured that I didn’t repo any hard surface meshes that I already created. I deleted any faces that wasn’t showing and copy/pasted these shells across to the respected areas.

TO NOTE: Throughout this entire process the symmetry/mirror settings were acting up due to the poor symmetry. There was a point where I was retoing the underheard sculpt and decided to redo it entirely with the mirror settings (on axis?) was on so this wouldn’t cause issues down the line. With the mirror I kept ensuring the origin point was to geometry so the mirror would act appropriately. Playing around with these settings and adjustments allowed for the process to become a lot smoother.

Retopology process finished:

This was one of the issues I had when shade smoothing my model. I was genuinely really confused as to why the collar would sink in like this. This area was overly complicated with the amount of vertices it had, and with little time remaining to trouble shoot these issues or even reto the collar again (which is what I would’ve honestly preferred to do, however again my lack of knowledge and time permitted me to do this) so I recalculated the normals using it’s respected shortcut and it seemed, visually, to work for the meantime. However this would cause me a lot of grief down the line and I’m still confused as to what went wrong here (from what I can tell from troubleshooting, simply just poor retopology. But that somewhat shows the importance of getting this stage right before moving on to UV mapping I suppose.)

After recalculating the normals. Again, although the problem looked to have ben solved it still caused issues. I’m hoping to one day come back to this model and properly sort through it’s issues because I really adored where the model was heading, it’s a real shame that things didn’t go as smoothly as I would’ve hoped.