Retopology
22/04/24
After finalising in ZBrush, I finally started retopology. I hadn’t done it before so I was very confused as to how I was even supposed to start it. I had a look at a few different videos on YouTube but I wasn’t sure if what they were showing was actually what I had to do, so I asked one of my group members just to confirm things.
I started off with the head, as I wanted to get the most difficult part done first. I searched for head retopology guides on Google Images to get an idea of how I should go about it.
I started off around the mouth, as I thought that it would require the most amount of detail. Using the mirror modifier, I only had to do half the body.
Once I got my first layer around the mouth, I could start thinking about the shaping for different areas.
I was struggling quite a bit in the beginning. I realised three layers in that i probably didn’t need to make such small faces, as I ended up spending almost an hour just working around the mouth. I tried my best to get it in decent shape but it ended up looking quite messy.
Once the area around the mouth was finished, I moved up towards the nose. I went around the nostrils to get that curved shape and slowly moved towards the tip of the nose. I tried my best to keep that curved shape of the nose, especially at the very tip, which ended up looking not too bad.
I decided it would be easier to map out the centre of the head first so I did a layer along the middle of the whole head so I could build parts of the head easily. Going from the nose up to the forehead and then back to the mouth. I felt that by doing this, I was able to build different parts of the head without needing to focus on the same areas, as it was getting a bit tedious and driving me mad.
My goal was to attack the more complicated areas of the first, like the mouth, eyes and nose, so I could then build out to the ears and, finally, the back of the head. I felt that this method would help me work the fastest to get the retopology finished, as I soon realised that it would get very tedious the longer I worked on it.
I wanted to get the roundness of the face in more detail, so I branched off the mouth to get the curve of the cheeks and connect it to the eye.
Once I got to the eye, I made a very thin layer around the inside to get the basic shape so I could build out and connect to the rest of the face.
Now that everything on the face was connected, I could start the ears.
I started from the cheek, extending along the jaw and then went up from the lobe. Following the shape of the ear along the helix, I ended up creating something like the Fibonaci sequence. Once I had a few layers on, it was very easy to build the rest of the ear and connect the different areas.
Because I was the default ZBrush head, the ear canal was fully sculpted, so I had to seal it off since there was no need to go the whole way through.
Now that all the different parts were finished and connected, I could finish the back of the head, which seemed very easy and straightforward.
It ended up not being as easy as I expected, as you can see since I didn’t match the face count to the middle part, so when I connected the different areas, there were multiple times where I had to merge layers or try to find another route.
Once I finished everything, I had to merge all the individual vertices, which I realised I should’ve done as I was going around the head. I ended up selecting all vertices and merging by distance, this was a lot faster, but it ended up removing a few faces around the lips and other areas. It didn’t make that big of a difference, and the shape was still there, so I left it like that.
Now that the head was done, I decided I would just go from top to bottom, so I moved onto the neck next.
I started by mapping the edges and middle so I could close into the middle. Once again, I made the mistake of not matching the top and bottom faces, so I ended up having too many faces along the bottom, which then had to be merged as I went up. I ended up adding a few loop cuts in areas that felt a bit empty. Ocassionally, I would remove the mesh from the sculpture to see how it looked on its own. If I felt that the topology wasn’t smooth enough, I would add a loop cut.
I used the same method as I went down, making small changes like making sure the faces along the top and bottom edges had the same number of faces to make merging easier.
For the chest, I extended from the middle out to the breast so I could get the curve shape around first and then extend back out.
Every once in a while, I would make big mistakes, so a big chunk would have to get removed. The knife tool ended up being very helpful with issues like this, as I realised I made quite a few mistakes earlier on that needed to be fixed.
I ended up using the knife and loop cut tool quite a lot for the rest of the body, like the waist, arms, and legs, as quite a lot of it was very reptitive and was just straight lines down. I would create larger faces and create loop cuts to cut them smaller to fit the sculp better.
Because snap-to-surface was on, it would easily stick to the sculpted surface. If there were any vertices that weren’t snapping properly, I could easily just click on each vertex to make it snap. I was very happy with this method, as it cut down on time by a lot and made the process a whole lot easier.
There were some cases where I had to use the knife tool instead of loop cuts because snap-to-surface was on. It was rounded objects like the waist and legs that would cause issues, as all the vertices would snap to one side instead of around. Although I found out afterwards that there was a way I could use loop cuts for rounded srufaces, all I had to do was turn off snapping momentarily and turn it back to snap the individual vertices back into place.
The arms and legs were the easiest, as they were all straightforward topologies and pretty similar. Using the loopcut method, I finished those quite quickly.
The last bit was the hands. This ended up being quite difficult. There was one interdigit that had a different shape than the others, so I had to turn off snapping to get the right length for each one.
I started off by getting the wrists done and extending out to each finger, I felt that that was the most important part to get down first. For the fingers, I felt that splitting it into six parts would be the best, two along each side and one for the front and back. Once I was done with everything, I changed all the body parts to Smooth Shade and reduced the subdivision level for all the joints to lower the face count.