Week 10

When modeling the head i had trouble keeping the pollycount as low as the body, especially when i got to the end of the model, at the neck, where it was to join the torso. The mesh detail I needed to get all the features and definition I wanted while maintaining quadratic topology just wasnt compatible with the torso (woah, thats a mouthfull). However, I've been toying with the idea of rigging the face eventually, so this difference in mesh resolution may have been nessecairy in the end any way. Now that I was in zBrush however, when subdeviting the mesh, the higher mesh density of the head mesh was multiplied, and the head's pollycount alone was the same as the entire body. I brough the model back into maya and tired mesh reduction, and got the mesh to a similar density, but even then, the joining of the two models was creating really ugly polys even after I'd reduced the density of head, and triying to clean up the model manually.


So this, along with the need for better edge flow and the oppertunity to reduce the polly count and add resymmetry lead me to retopologise the model. So the model was taken into maya and the undeveloped half deleted, geometry mirrored, the head's mesh reduced as described above, and taken back into zbrush.

I'm really happy with how it came out. The new retopologised mesh has only a fraction of the faces of the old, and retians all its detail. There was one significant problem I had though, and I think -as I often do- I became fixated on it. I was unable to import the new retopologised model as the subdivisional level of the high detailed mesh. I spend days looking online and trying to fix this, and in the end just subdevided and repainted the muschles onto the new mesh. If I had done this in the first place I could have saved myself ALOT of wasted time.

Heres the retopologised mesh.

So with another train trip ahead of me I started modeling the atagonist, and with the new retopologised mesh I was able to finish the model's body mesh in a single trip.

Click to enlarge.

According to the story, Monk Set a much was a man of huge stature. He thought himself the strongest of all the monks and had a short tempter and fought often. He was an unpleasant man, and a bully. I've tried to reflect this in his model. Details like a broken nose and scarred forehead, I also gave him a strong jaw like and generally masculine features..