FMP: Dr. Henrik Ottmeyer – Retopology, UVs, baking

This time I retopped the mesh in 3ds max. I started with the head, paying a lot of attention to have the necessary loops. Instead of using pictures as reference, I used some Marmoset viewer scenes I found on Artstation of Dishonored models. For the rest of the body I tried to keep the polygon density quite even and add extra loops to the joints to make sure they would bend properly. I also added some extra polyloops on the waist. This time I tried a different approach with the clothing – instead of having the polygons follow the folds, I retopped them as a cylinder and cut lines where the folds are.
The only areas where I increased the polygon density is the head and hands. The polycount of the character is 25k without the hair cards.  EDIT: 27.5k with the hair cards

I split my UVs into 6 texture sheets: one for the apron and shirt, one for the skin, lenses, eyes, one for the gloves, shoes and pants and another one for the hair and hair cards. There are some spaces left on some of the texture sheets since I didn’t have time to make them look tidy, but there are no visible deformations. I put the glasses on a different texture sheet because the lenses are going to be transparent and I didn’t want to have any troubles with the UE4 materials.
Also, this time, instead of using 2 meshes for the eyes as I did for my first character, I used only one. Even though I may not be able to make the iris look realistic, it is cheaper and the shader doesn’t take 10 minutes to compile on my PC. (I did some research and making the parallax on the iris when you use a single mesh is quite complicated and I am not that advanced when it comes to UE4)

 I baked the maps in Substance Painter and I think it was for the first time when they came out with no errors at all from the first try. However, at some point I noticed that there was something wrong with the topology of the apron and I needed to rebake the normal and the AO. I will talk about the texturing process in the next blog post.