Last week, I finished sculpting the mermaid model. This week, I imported the high-poly model into Maya and worked on the topology of the model.
Model Topology (process and reflection):
This time’s topology was actually not a successful job for me. I wasted some time on some complex shapes. After making the body, I still needed to make the shape of the hair directly in Maya and then topology the tail fin. The figures, which are separate parts from the body, look very simple. Still, I plan to use high-poly for baking in the subsequent textures so that the simple model can look more refined.
Model topology is a tedious and complex task that requires me to balance maintaining model details and optimizing performance.
When making the model topology, I pay special attention to how to arrange the lines of the model reasonably to ensure that the number of faces of the model is kept within a range that will not crash the computer and, at the same time, ensure that there are enough lines to allow the character’s joints to move freely.
Because I redesigned the character’s face and facial features, the shape of the character’s face changed significantly. I performed detailed topology processing on the eyebrows and separated them into two polygons from the entire face model. However, as the details of the model increase, the difficulty of the topology also increases accordingly, and I need to spend more time to complete the refined and optimized topology.
When doing the character topology, I paid particular attention to the overlap of the eyeballs and eye sockets. Even though I didn’t add teeth this time, I still needed to ensure the mouth had a hollow structure. In addition, I found that the topology of the ears was more troublesome because I sculpted the ears separately from the face in Zbrush, which resulted in some unmodeled parts having to be manually processed in the subsequent topology process, which undoubtedly increased the difficulty of the work. It can also be regarded as a lesson. It would help if you planned the dynamics of the entire model first before designing and researching the model or mastering more advanced production methods to avoid the dilemma of being unable to produce.
As you can see from this model, while the refinement of the character has improved somewhat, the model still has a lot of faces. It will take me a lot of time to complete a more perfect topology.
I once tried to modify and reuse some old character models directly. Still, unfortunately, the old models did not overlap perfectly with the finely sculpted models, especially in the hands and faces. I used Maya’s magnet function to attach the models directly. Making it fit, but instead of saving me time, this process wasted a lot of time. Eventually, I realized it might be more efficient to re-topologize all the models. Because this experience also made me realize that there is still a lot of room for improvement in my modeling abilities, and I need to continue to learn and improve in future work.
Final result:
This week, I completed the entire topology of this model. Next week, I will make basic models of other characters and scenes. The production of these models will be easier, so I am also preparing to rig this mermaid model.