Retopology problem

After completing the retopology of the trees I put my work into substance, substance is where I created the materials for the game. My first attempt of me using substance I thought it went very well for the lack of time that I had with it, but when I went back onto blender and added the principal setup so I can put the textures in all went wrong, the texture didn’t appear for some reason. And apparently the retopology was wrong, I didn’t uv wrapped it and I didn’t mark any seams for the uv wrapping.

Obviously, I was overwhelmed with not just trying to fix the trees, but also the amount of assets that I had to clean and texture them. So for help I contacted my teammate Raff and I explained what the situation was, he looked at the edit mode of my low poly model, and there were lots of triangles and edges for a low poly and I didn’t UV wrap it. I used that same technique with the rest of my models so this would mean that if I did this same mistake with the trees, then that would mean I did same things with all of my other models, this would mean that I would have to got back and clean the retopology of the models and then put them into substance.

When I first heard about this news I freaked out because it was only a week away from the deadline the project, and I already had a lot to do came when it comes substance, and now I have to go back and clean everything that I have done, I had an anxiety attack over it I felt incredibly angry at myself because I misunderstood what retopology was about, when retopologising you use squares not triangles, I felt horrible because I felt like I let everyone down and now slow things up when it comes to the process of the of getting these assets done, and considering the amount of time that I have left the comes this project.

I decided I will be a lot more beneficial if I focused on retopologising the trees and mushroom because those are the most important assets to make considering that the title the game is Misho and the Forest of dreams. My teammate Callum lost his work of character sculpting, so that would mean that the environmental work will be the main focus of the vertical slice, this would mean that there will be more pressure for me because I’m in charge of the environments and if I don’t get the environments done then my work won’t be the game.

Raff and taught me retopology the right way now, the technique goes a bit like this: in blender you select the vertices by pressing B and dragging along press the right click on your mouse to dissolve edges, after that Raff showed me how to retopologise correctly I did some cleaning of trees and mushrooms, and for the most part the retopology was successful and I fixed most of the problems with the edges and vertices, but there are a couple problems I face along the way, for example when. I was trying to clean the retopology of the tree with the branches but every time I fixed a square and there was a triangle which is something you shouldn’t have in a retopology model this happened all throughout the right apology especially came to the branches so I decided it was to get rid of the branches altogether so basically look like a stump but though I got rid of the branches the problem still commit still Coming up so I decided to disband that tree altogether and my team wanted me to create a new tree which had branches.

After I retopologise the trees I put them into substance with the help with Callum I went back onto blender and the texturing was successful but because I got rid of some of the branches I decided just to make a new tree altogether.

So I followed the blender tutorial of a low Poly tree so I added a cube and I cut the face in half and stretch the edge so look like a hexagon and I use this shape for the stump of the tree, then I stretched it by the top part of the stump to create the branches, after I got the basic shape of the tree I went onto subdivision surface the one on the shade smooth after that I went on to sculpt mode and use the clay strips with brush size 0.38 with a 0.908 strength to raise the dent that I used to look like tree barks.

After that I added a 7 sided shape and skin wrapped throughout the stump and the branches of the tree and then joined them together by filling other edges together by pressing F onto each vertices to create a new Polygon, after I made the retopology version of the tree I had to UV unwrap it. My first attempt was to mark seam the stump and then cut the tree in half, but that didn't work because it didn't have all the vertices, so after that I marked seam the branches and the tree stump.

On Monday I had a meeting with Phil regarding what's going to be happening in the last week and both me and him decided that it will be a good idea if I just have a random picture of my assets so therefore cleaning the rest of my broken retopology assets wouldn't be necessary.

Although the retopology did not come to plan unfortunately, I think with the time frame that I had I think I learn how to fix the problem very quickly by cleaning the edges and vertices and marking seam and trying to problem solve how to UV unwrapped a big model. I think what I've learned was that if you don't have a very strong foundation of a basic concept it is very very difficult for anyone to advance through to the next level so in the context of me I didn't understand what retopology meant so that meant that me advancing to the next stage of my pipeline process will be a lot more difficult.

References

Geek, C., 2021. How to Create a Low Poly Tree in 1 Minute. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7PdiGXbrD0> [Accessed 3 June 2021].