For the retopology stage, I was intimidated to start it because it almost looked like an impossible task, but I took our lecturers’ advice and started off with the loops on the elbow, knees, belly, shoulders, thighs and all the little holes on the face and gradually built around it section by section.

The face was a bit easier than the rest, because I relied on the class exercise we did and took some inspiration from how I did my fox model’s snout last year.

these are the references of retopology I used in the PureRef’s  bellow:

 

This is how I used my references specially when all the polygons were all over the place, I used the marker in blender to draw the paths out for myself to make it easier for my eyes to follow the flow, I gradually adjusted them and went back with the loop cut to make sure I got it right. I wanted to make sure I had some muscle shape and fat into my retopology, to help push details out of my model, especially for the fat folds on his back, I wanted them to keep their shape and also have a nice silhouette when I got to the posing. I also used the same idea for the bumps on his ears to keep their shape and not have a stretch in the topology.

 

 Problem solving:

• I was able to fix the diamond shape I was getting with the chest, which was an easy fix, instead of meeting at one point, it was more of a lattice.

• I had a long issue with the hands, I was unable to get them to connect with the rest of the body while still having enough polygons to get the shape that I wanted, my first attempt wasn’t right my lecturer pointed out how I was using later stages of a hand retopology as a reference trying to get the same loops but it messed up the topology of the hands. I used simpler references and went about it patiently. I still had a problem with the vertices count but I manages to work my way around using what I learned in the topology puzzle exercise.

Before:

After:

 

I added nails and a demo of the cloth which I later went back and altered multiple, times to get the look I wanted, which best matched my concept.