Xiahou Ba Final Mesh

Over the weekend I got Xiahou Ba's final 'in-game' mesh finished. This mesh see as significant reduction in poly-count, while retaining as much silhouette detail as possible. The mesh itself still has a few areas that could do with some correcting and/or cleaning up, but I will look into these individually as and when I find problems with projecting the high resolution detail down to them in ZBrush next. The next step however, is to UV unwrap this mesh properly.

Here you can see that really not much detail is lost on the final mesh, but note that it contains no subdivision border creases nor any internal detail such as pockets and the highly detailed shoes to stand up to the sculpting process better in ZBrush.

In the coming days, re-targeting the subdivisions from the base-mesh to the final mesh could be a messy process; I'm not entirely sure how the final mesh will react with no border edges. I may have to add creases in ZBrush to uphold the shapes, but these must be removed in again for the final mesh. 

Xiahou Ba Clothing Update #3

Tonight I added his necklace and fixed his belt, both technically and stylistically. He now has a much more rock-themed belt to match his retro clothing.

I noticed the model currently stands at just over 100,000 triangles, making it a bit on the wrong side of optimised for games, however this will eventually be rectified once his sculpting is finished in ZBrush using this mesh as its' base. The majority of the model will then be retopologised down to a low resolution mesh with not only normal maps baked, but also textures created from the high resolution geometry data, such as his necklace for example.

Xiahou Ba - Initial Retopology for Base-Mesh

I've finished the initial retopology stage to be used as the new base-mesh in ZBrush. This mesh will have all of the current detail projected onto it, and I will then progress from there instead of the Dynamesh mesh that I currently have in ZBrush. This process should make the model much more efficient and easier to work with in the future.

I have tried to keep this mesh as clean as possible, using only quads for better deformation, and trying not to alter the edge-flow too much as this often causes tight angles to appear on the sculpture surface at higher resolutions. This mesh is not build for 'in-game use'; it is only to be used as a base-mesh. The final mesh topology will be built once the character is fully sculpted from this model, and that will be the mesh that takes into account animation deformation and required resolution changes for each area of the body.

This was all done in Maya 2015 using its vastly improved 'Modelling-Toolkit' tools. The resulting mesh is 6876 triangles, marked down from the original decimated mesh of 169,176 triangles, and that came from a mesh of around 1 million triangles.