Retopology

I have started the journey of retopologizing our characters. Our models from Zbrush were way too high in in polycount so we took them into Maya for retopo. We first started with using the auto-retopoligize tool in Maya. We had success with the grandma character with that. Of course we still had to go and fix a few things here and there. However that tool was not working out for this cop character. Even trying a whole bunch of different settings in the retopologize window I could not get his facial topology to look good enough. And really his face and his hands were the only part we needed good topology for. The main issue was the symmetry, even with that option being checked, it was creating both side equally. That made it too difficult to try and hand fix the edge loops.

So, for the cop character I have been retopologizing by hand with quad draw. Overall the experience of quad draw was pretty easy to pick up however, efficiently retopologizing is a different story. I often found myself going too far into detail before connecting everything. Which I think I have done again in these photos but I'll still try. I have completed the hands, body, and head. I just need to get the ear done and then connect everything so I can duplicate for the other side and merge vertices to make it all one mesh. Then I just need to retopologize his shirt and pants and he will be ready for UVs. I have learned a lot through this process but I will admit I severely underestimated the time it would take to complete this.

This stage is really the only thing holding us back right now but with the grandma character done and the intruder almost finished. I think we will still be moving the project along nicely.