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Timelapse: Shirt & Pants Retopology Pt.1
March 26th, 2020
info License: CC-BY
Julien Kaspar
Publisher
This is the first part of the shirt & pants retopology timelapse.
Other helpful links:
- Rain - File 4: Retopology & UV mapping: The file that includes the original retopology of Rain.
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10 comments
You are building in the cloth folds in the retopo, does applying cloth physics to the clothing items (and tweaking) create too much overhead for animations compared to your basic method?
@Wayne Batchelor Yes, the idea with these characters was to not worry about dynamic clothes. Even if this would be simulated in a mostly automatic way or handled by another FX artist, it makes the animation process more difficult. These characters are meant to be as easy to animate as possible.
On the body topology everything is set to have a good flow, example; running up the leg and over the back in a continuouis flow. The clothes, particularly the pants, seem to deviate from that. Where you are sculpting in the folds behind the knees, you use a number of diamonds that create five point star posts, this seems to spiral the flow around the knee in different ways. Is this intentional for the folds to open and close more naturally when animating? Does it conflict with the body topology.
@Wayne Batchelor Diamonds are actually not that bad, when placed somewhere they are not stretching too much. I actually made cheat sheets for this course. One of them is showing the folds topology logic a bit more: https://studio.blender.org/training/stylized-character-workflow/5e7102a35d6a0f559750c76f/
These should be fine when rigged and animated, as long as they are on a mostly flat, non deforming surface. Or at least a surface that is mostly compressing, like the back of the knees.
@Julien Kaspar Thanks for the link. I tend to take apart concepts to really get to know them, and the thinking behind them, rather than just skim over tutorials so, I do tend to ask a few more questions than most. My original background was training CAD/CAM systems, even wrote books on procedures for CNC systems so I'm comfortable in 3D space, but character creation and animation are quite a different creature. I have creative projects I want to create for education/entertainment. Thanks for your information and patience.
@Wayne Batchelor You're welcome! I'm glad to answer questions any time :)
Is there a reason why you prefer to model in the folds on the shirt at this stage versus applying a multi-res modifier after the base mesh has been retopologized? Using the multi res modifier to later on adjust details.
@Javier Pineda THere are pros and cons for either. You could just as well sculpt the folds via a multires and even bake them into displacement maps so they only appear in the render on higher resolution. If they are modeled into the retopoogy, you can be sure to see them on the lowest resolution and they can be better accounted for in rigging and animation. I prefer modeling them in if they are always visible anyway, especially on stylized clothing.
Is there a work flow for animation where a multi-res modifier is applied to a retopologized base mesh rather than retopologizing little bumps in this part of the process?
@Javier Pineda Absolutely. For various movies we had characters with a multires modifier on them for all the shots. Just make sure to have the armature modifier above the multires in the modifier stack.