Michael Taylor

Intro:

In my first tutorial, I showed a technique that helps free up a bit of the texturing/unwrapping workflow. So I thought why not do the same for modeling. Being able to retopologize a model is a pretty wonderful asset, as you can focus more on creating the form of the model, and plan out the edgeloops later. This is especially handy for digital sculpting where an artist might want to jump straight into sculpting with zspheres or an existing base mesh, and then create the game mesh afterwards.

This particular technique I’ve picked up from the Softimage Community forums. There are other techniques I’ve heard of as well (such as using the Shrinkwrap operation), but I’ve chosen this method as it is pretty straight forward.

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And Happy Holidays.

Also a new anime-ish model I’m been working on recently:

I’m going to be splitting the site in two a bit.

http://cryrid.com will serve purely as a portfolio for finished pieces.
http://cryrid.com/art will remain the same, and be home to my tutorials, art journal/updates, and misc other art-related things.

I’m also planning on purchasing Mudbox 2009, which I look forward to using soon. It was a close call between it and zBrush, but I feel Mudbox will be the best choice at this point in time, and anything else (retopology) should be easy enough to do with XSI. It is a shame they don’t offer an educational package at this point in time however, so I might have to wait until Christmas comes along.

Here is an updated version of the shader I’ve been using. The 3 point lights are now using world coordinates instead of camera coordinates, and it now has support for a separate alpha map (I may look into getting it to pull the alpha from the diffuse map’s alpha channel, but since I use this shader for previewing only it isn’t a priority) .

Please note: You still have to flip the V coordinate for your texture projection.

Download Link for Shader