3D Reflection 28 - Retopping the statue

I went back to the statue of Osiris that I had made in Zbrush, and worked on retopping it. Although it was much faster than a character to retop, I still wanted to use it as an opportunity to practise good facial topology. Therefore I took my time with the facial loops.

The top part of the helmet was challenging to retop as I wanted to maintain the shape but not use too many tris as this was just a prop. I worked on simplifying the shape afterwards. I also applied a base to the bottom of the state so that it could be placed into the wall alcoves in the tomb room well and not have the feet visibly clip into the surface due to the slant.

I think that the final statue is a bit more slender than I wanted but once textured and placed into the alcove I think that it will look like an original statue of Osiris.

3D Reflection 27 - Rigging process and testing the bake

Rigging started with the checklist supplied by my tutors. I ensured that I had reset the Xform, centred the model and later applied the correct materials to the correct UV sheets. I then brought in the biped, which I centred to the model and the grid.

 I created enough bones for the fingers to function, and one large toe bone as the sandal would move all the toes together when walking. As I went, I created test animations to look for deformations, especially within the joints.

I found that the elbows creased correctly after weighting. I found the weighting aspect difficult as I often found myself going over parts I had just weighted, but using the weighting table I was able to work much faster.

For the centerline of the long skirt, I made a falloff section that weighted to both legs. The skirt area was the most difficult to weight correctly, and I will go back and edit it soon as I would like to improve it. However, this rigging process helped me to determine whether or not I needed to attach certain items to the body, such as the Usekh collar and the necklace. I was worried that they would clip into each other, but I am satisfied that the rigging process works with these objects being seperate when they are weighted properly.

I ecported my high poly and low poly meshes into substance painter in order to do a test bake. If the AO was off I might have had to attach the objects anyway, but I was very pleased to see that the bake worked perfectly. I could not see any errors, and it also retained a good level of detail.

3D Reflection 26 - Using Decimation and importing into 3Ds Max

I had some issues with my files corrupting, but I was able to locate an older zbrush file and recover my work.I decided to use the decimation tool in Zbrush to greatly reduce the number of tris and maintain the detail before importing into 3ds max as I was having conatsant crashing issues.

After decimating I imported my mesh. I had some errors with backfacing faces too close to eachother on the skirt and sash, as well as the gauntlets. I decided to fix this to prevent baking issues later on in the process. I used the 3ds max relax tool in the freeform menu to bring the top faces further away from the back faces. I used it carefully and precisely to stop the rest of the detail from disappearing, like the creases in the linen skirt.

Once this was done I began retopping the body. In hindsight I should have started with the head but I felt that the body would be the most challenging to work through. I found that I could seperate the elements that would be easier to retop and continued working like this. The most challenging areas of the retop process were the joints, as I had to ensure that the loops were correct and that they could collapse properly.

I retopped the body and clothes together: the two skirts and the sash and belt. This would help me to avoid clipping when rigging and make the weighting process more efficient.

The final parts I retopped were the head, hands and feet. The hands and feet were especially challenging as I had less space to work with in making working loops and collapsing joints.

I used reference to make the face topology. I ended up with a fairly high poly face but as I was working well within my budget of 15000 tris I was satisfied with this outcome. I also reviewed it with my teacher.

The crown was retopped as part of the face as it would not be removed in game and could be considered one object. I struggled with the potruding sections but I am pleased with how they turned out.

For the underneath section of the skirt I extruded the edges up to the knees, andd collapsed them in. This prevented me from wasting tris on parts of the legs that would not be visible.

The feet and lower legs were made in a similar way to the arms. I ensured that I straightened the underneath of the sandal in the retop as the Zbrush sandal was uneven and would be visibly clipping through the floor.

Lastly I retopped the accessories that needed to be done seperately, such as the beard, the pyramid decoration and the necklace.

For the beaded areas, I used an overarching plane to block out the areas where there would be detail. This saved a lot of time and would still allow the bake to show through well if baked correctly.

The last part that I retoppped was the eye, which I used symmetry on. I made the cornea shape which bulged outwards from the iris, and when baked it would show the detail further inside the eye. This will make a more realistic eye shape.

Finally, I applied suitable smoothing groups to my model, and unwrapped. I tried to keep all of the body and main clothes on one sheet, and the remainder of the clothes and accessories on another.

I was pleased with the results of my retop, especially due to the problems I encountered when importing.