as my final exercise to date, before creating this blog and speedrunning through my not-very-extensive 3d history so far, i decided to bring the latest sculpt into blender.
what you need to know is:
a sculpt, when coming out of the sculpting phase, has A Ton Of Vertices. the head i showed in the last post had about 560 000, which is just too many, man. thats just too much. if you want to do anything with the character, that is. i've already told you about rigging, which is essential for posing. the most relevant part is that a rig, or the bones that are controlled by it, define the position of vertices. a vertex is a single point, basically a corner of the mesh. so you can likely imagine that a mesh with half a million vertices doesn't deform as well or, especially, as fast as one with 10k. for the type of work i want to do, i need real time responses, and that's just impossible when you have to calculate the new positions for half a million little dots.
we basically create an entirely new mesh on top of the old one. a mesh that has good edge flow, so it deforms the way it's supposed to. and a mesh that has WAY fewer vertices than the original had.
this is the standard workflow for sculpted characters that need to be rigged, for games or animations or films or whatever. you can also skip the sculpting stage and box model your character, which is a tactic anime artists tend to frequent, but it does give a very different result to what i'm doing, and also i like sculpting.
retopo is quite disliked, and for good reason. it's tedious and it's also somehow boring as fuck, because all you do is create new points and edges and faces with little to no creative input, and it takes hours. took me hours, at least.
anyways - the retopologized head:
the eyes are seperate objects again, created with the same addon i used to give shaun eyes when he didn't have any, thats why they look different than the rest.
this is also, and i want that noted, not an example of good topology for a retopologized mesh.
the essentials are there, meaning the loops around mouth and eyes that are extremely important for the deformation that applies to eyes and mouths. most of the faces are quads, too, which is good. a significant amount of faces are also triangles, which is less good. this mesh is supposed to work with a subdivision modifier, which basically seperates each of the quads into four smaller quads. that obviously doesn't quite work with triangles and tends to lead to very funky issues.
but, well, it was my first ever retopology and also it's a practice head, i don't really care about perfection. i learned the workflow, and that was a very good thing to learn.
unfortunately we're not done yet.
the new mesh is way less detailed than the old one, evidently, but we do want the detail back, right? thats why we sculpted it in the first place!
the solution to this problem is called a normal map. it looks horrendous, because it's not meant to be looked at, it's meant to tell each little point on the mesh in which direction to reflect the light. that means we can fake some bumps and valleys and shadows and lights, all while keeping the mesh light.
to my absolute misfortune i had absolutely zero clue how to get a normal map out of my high poly sculpt and onto my low poly mesh, and i don't want to bore you, but the first iterations were these:
if you know nothing about normal maps, let me just tell you this: they're not supposed to look like that. well, the colors on the second one are adjacent to correct, but the first one is plain garbage.
it took me about two hours of clawing my way through iterations and settings until i finally, finally arrived at this:
beautiful. immaculate. looks like hot garbage, but this is actually what a normal map is supposed to look like. this is actually the correct normal map for this sculpt. wild, i know.
anyways, now with the correct normal map applied and added into the shader for the low poly mesh, it was time to have some fun with it, finally, so thie first thing i did was blast the poor man with IMMENSE light:
made a cool render, though. you see very little because my man just opened the gates to heaven, but in the shadow parts you can absolutely see the detail in nose, mouth, and eye area. this is the same mesh as shown in thie wireframe above. normal map magic. truly one of my favorite things of 3d work, because normal maps just change everything so much and always for the better.
we're still not done, though.
i talked about wanting to go stylized with my characters a bunch, and i know there's a quite simple way to toon shade in blender, so that's what i did next, to varying results -
tried different colors, tried different intensities for the normal map, tried some more thingies and tricks and bits and bops. there's some ambient occlusion mixed in there to give that slight shading on the neck. there's a fresnel for the rim light. i changed a lot of settings for a lot of things and then ultimately realized that i don't actually like the way this looks, because it looks best without the normal map entirely, which means it completely loses all the detail i had in my normal map, but it still is too detailed and all over the place to be a toon-esque stylized sculpt. which to me makes it not quite anything, and also not quite good. well, it's really not what i wanted from it, at least.
i have the not very specific but very big plan to someday create a comic entirely in blender, and everything i'm doing is a test and trial and practice to pave my way there. i now know that i either have to simplify my characters by a significant amount, or i have to say goodbye to my beloved cel shading.
so, well, i said goodbye to my beloved cel shading and tried another approach yet again. a more graphic novel inspired rendering style, still kind of semi-realistic, at least i hope so. and i kind of found a new path to follow:
the last one's the one i like most so far. the added lighting really does some heavy lifting, but i genuinely think that's a style i'll try and refine a bit more. i'd read a comic that looked like that. i hope you would, too.
bonus turnaround gif for the sculpt appreciation, and because i'm proud of it:
no clue why the lip lineart bleeds through around the corners, but i'll figure it out.
this marks the current state of progress. the next task will be to give him a rig, because after about 10 hours of retopologizing and baking normal maps left and right and then trying out about fifty different shader settups, i'm spent for the day. but he is ready for rigging, and he will get a rig, because i need the practice and because i want to do it.
