This week was full of all the parts of character modeling that were not fun. It was spent doing the tedious work, including topology and UVs. I dread this part of the pipeline, as it's not fun or flowing like the sculpting or texturing, it's the very technical side. Topology is also something that always takes forever.
Topology
Like I stated on my last devlog blog, this is my second time dealing with topology. I can see how my skills in this department improved, and I felt way less lost while doing it this time. I decided for the sake of time I wouldn't retopologize every part of the model, as not all of the pieces needed it. I also came to the decision that I wouldn't worry about making the topology game ready for this sculpt. I retopologized the body, eyes, and eyelashes.
The mechanical parts I made for this sculpt had a pretty low poly count, so it was easy to justify not doing retopolgise it. I did have issues with the beads on those pieces though. The poly count on those were ridiculously high, so I decided I needed to redo them. I went back to the mesh that I made the brush out of and reduced the poly count until it was under 500 polys. From there, I remade the insert mesh brush and put them back on the mechanical parts of the body. This really helped with poly count and made the model easier to manage.
UVs
The start of UVs on this model was a disaster. There was unforeseen non-manifold geometry on my body mesh. I have no idea how that happened because that was the topology I made, but it was came from some strange double face in the mesh. I fixed it by deleting the faces and remaking them in quad draw, and then everything unfolded really nicely. Some of the UVs I made myself in Maya, and some of them I made using ZBrush's auto UV tool. Using that tool worked pretty well for this project because it separated the beads out, which will be a big help in texturing as they will be different bright colors.
Next Steps
I've already started baking this model in Substance Painter. I'm very happy that this model is baking the way I want, as my previous project Ingrid Hawkinian had massive baking problems. After it's baked, I'll start texturing. Next I'll texture the model stand and prop. I want this sculpt to be cel shaded, so I will be rendering in Unreal engine. I'm excited to see this project start to come together, and I can't wait to see how much more together it'll look with texture.