Weeks 5&6 - Sculpting and Retopology


Week 5

  During week five we continued to work in Z-Brush. We stared by learning about the primary, secondary and tertiary details, as well as the pipeline for character sculpting. We were also introduced to the useful brushes like: clay build up, clay, damian strand, trim dynamic, smooth and move. The lecture continued with us learning about the importance of proportion and anatomical reference when designing a character. 



  We then split the class and participated in 2 exercises. The first exercise was to annotate a model of a human in Maya. We had to gather anatomical reference and label the various muscle groups found in a human body. We then switched and proceeded with modeling lips in Z-Brush. This was a bit challenging at the start but became really intuitive and I got accustomed to the sensitivity of the drawing tablet. I found it very important to have reference for my lips as I sculpted them as it allowed me to do it more precise.

Anatomy Exercise

Week 6

  This week we learned about retopology as it is important in decreasing the polygon count of the final model as well as for better texturing and animation. After listening to the lecture on retopology tools and techniques we proceeded to retopologise a high poly-count model of a head. I quite enjoyed this exercise as I found the task quite intuitive. I had to play around a lot with the topology a lot to make sure the mesh fit cleanly around the original. Overall I was quite happy with the final result. 

Retopologised Head


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