Retoping my Character

 After I had the high poly done, it was time to do the retop. Since this is quite a complex project, I had to think about how I was going to approach it beforehand. Skin needs subsurface, so it has to be placed on its own UV sheet. Since the presence of the turtleneck is dividing the body and the head, I will be placing the head on a different UV sheet, while keeping the abdomen area and the hands on another. To minimize the errors that could occur with the baking process, I decided to retop every clothing object as a different object, while also keeping their details as different meshes as well.

Working on the head, I had a look at some examples on Polycount and started placing the polygons, firstly the eyes and mouth, which are the most important considering the presence of the loops. 

Next on my list were the hands, since those are one of the most difficult things to retop, mainly because of the presence of so many joints with the fingers and also the small scale that I had to work with. 

To make my life easier I decided to only retop my finger, make a copy of the result and place it on the other fingers, using conform to place the vertices back on the surface.

The clothes were pretty straightforward, the blouse and vest needing some more attention, considering the presence of shoulders and elbows. I have taken advantage of the extend tool heavily, which sped up the process significantly.

I have also taken into consideration the possibility of clipping, so I deleted as many of the polys that were not going to be visible but keeping the ones that had importance over the deformation, such as the ones on the shoulders.

I tried to keep the geometry as even and consistent as I could, having more dense areas in places with specific details, an example being the folds on the trousers. or the features of the face. 

Retoping the hair was quite easy, the only thing that I had to worry about was keeping the general flow of the strands. 

I decided to retop those as different meshes, for a better bake while texturing. 

I am very happy with the retop, It did take me a small while to get done, but using the new methods I was able to finish it faster, in comparison to my Husky project.

The whole model ended up having 34174 tris, which is an ok budget considering the large number of individual meshes.

I also added some planes for the eyelashes and eyebrows. I will be using alphas for those.