#quad draw

25/11 Samantha Hernandez

After taking into Andrew’s advice on always enabling tessellation and having gentler use of the smooth and bulge tools; as well as being gentler with the grab tool in general. I was finally able to sculpt a mane that (although resembled some kind of weird starfish, sea creature) I was pleased with because it stayed true to my reference sheet.

So I brought my sculpted model, at the lowest division setting, from Mudbox back to Maya to retopologise the mane and make and final tweaks before sending it to Substance Painter for texturing.

Here is the very start of my retopology process, using Maya’s quad draw.

As you can see later into my sculpt, I hid the body mesh so it didn’t get in my way. I would later hide more and more of the meshes, such as the hair and the teeth as I worked my way into the centre.

The points/fluffs were going to be tricky, especially in regards to handling the topology flow and their relationship with one another across the mesh.

As you can see in these two images, I began running into major issues with the centre edges merging into each other and Maya’s symmetry feature becoming unreliable. This is when I attempt to relax the edges along the geometry or add additional edge loops near the the centre-most edge.

Note the faceless edge at the centre of where I deleted them in order to fix them.

Here is the topology as it appears again, with the hole filled in, smoothed. When unsmoothed, the mesh appears perfect, but it is revealed there are overlapping vertices.

Here is a video showcasing the symmetry ‘merging’ issue in action. 

At one stage I managed to work around the issue (see lower image) by temporarily disabling symmetry, relaxing the area a bit and then re-enabling it, followed by mirroring the mesh so it’s truly symmetrical again.

Unfortunately, as I continued working on the topology, that’s when what’s depicted in the video started occuring again.

Here is the topology continuing through to the back of the mane.

Here is it progressing into the rear underside. Note the two bulges I accidentally left from sculpting. These would not be reflected within the retopology.

Here is my progress towards retoplogising the ends of the points. As shown, I began facing difficulties involving triangles and n-gons when trying to solve them. 

The usual solutions were to add more edges (which can make the model more resource-intensive and harder to work with) and to redirect some of the edges to make more of a proper loop.

Here’s an example of the topology on one of the fluffs, near Honey’s neck, showcasing a half-loop.

Here is my first completed version of the toplogy. I wasn’t pleased with how one of the points didn’t take its full shape properly, so I went back to retopologise it. Mainly with the addition of more loops and edges.

As you can see the geometry is very tight after adjusting the topology. Potentially more so than what’s preferable, but it’ll probably have to do.

Here is an overall view of the mesh, with a smoothed version of the retopologised mane, before I export her into Substance for texturing. 

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ybRRNY9Ng)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMLCbEM8OVA)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztfDJN55WSE)