Today I finished the first stage of sculpting Karma. This was then decimated using Decimation Master in ZBrush, then brought back into Maya for retopology. I soon figured that I could just speed most of this process up using ZRemesher in ZBrush, and bringing those models in too, which worked well for the most part. Then things stared to go wrong.
The final retopology would need to be built in a way that came apart, with the joints all modelled internally ready for 3D printing. This was already proving to be a lot of trouble to make properly, especially from a high res mesh. Then getting the original mesh to re-project its details onto the new geometry in ZBrush also didn't appear to be going as smoothly as I had hoped either.
The upshot is that there is now a full, high resolution sculpt of Karma, all posed and set for good renders, but not suitable for 3D printing.
The downside is trying to figure out an efficient way of creating his internal structure while maintaining all of his sculpt information, and have every piece of the final mesh completely 'water-tight'. It can be done, but it looks like one hell of a lot more work than first anticipated, mostly probably down to the way I created him in the first place, which is unfortunate. If I continue down this path, it may mean having to re-sculpt a lot of his from scratch again.
For now, I will fight on to see where this goes. Until then, I at least have a perfectly renderable character, which could be basically coloured with some ease too.
