Preparing character for the texturing

Last week I finished the high poly of my shaman. However now I had to create a mid poly for the baking. But the poly count of my high poly was still way too high, and I had to reduce it before exporting for Maya (Autodesk, 2020).

To reduce the poly count, I had to use DynaMesh.

Firstly, I created poly groups on the whole body of my character, so the DyneMesh would know how to reduce the polycount without losing too much detail. Next, when I was on the highest subdivision level, I deleted lower subdivisions. Then, I changed the resolution of DynaMesh to 2048 and pressed "DynaMesh".

Polygroups on the whole body

Polygroups on the head

That reduced the points from 26,6 mln to 1,96 mln which was quite impressive. This way I had my high poly, ready for baking, but for the mid poly that was not enough. So I chose to retopologise it in Maya (2020), with the help of Quad Draw, but after many hours my topology was very bad and complicated. So I gave up the idea for a minute, to try a different way.

I decided to use the ZRemesher. I opened my DynaMeshed model and went to ZRemesher. I selected the option "Keep Groups" and I pressed the button. Unfortunately, because of it, I lost the whole shape of the mouth:

To fix it, I decided to create polygroups from the beginning and to try again. So I repeated the process of DynaMeshing, then I pre-processed my mesh for the Decimation and I decimated it. After that, I ZRemeshed it again. This time I was successful and I reduced the points to 17 000:

This way I had my mid and low-poly ready for baking. At least the body. I exported it out as FBX. I repeated the same process for all of my subTools.

The next step was to UVUnwrapp everything, and then bake mid poly onto low poly. I started with the body, but every time I tried to bake it after unwrapping, I had these rough borders on the cut edges:

I have been changing cuts for hours until I realised that all I had to do was to attach it to the Bump Mapping and change the colour space to Raw. Since then, UV Unwrapping became much easier for me. When I was done, I exported the mesh as an FBX file.

Low poly and mid poly

Low poly baked next to mid poly

Baked low poly

Baked Normal Maps:

Shoes normal

Body normal

Headdress normal

Stripes normal

Cloth3 normal

Cloth2 normal

Bones normal

Cloth1 normal

After that, it was time to bake Ambient Occlusion Maps. To do that I applied new material - aiAmbientOcclusion, then I opened "Render to the Texture", I changed the resolution to 2048 and Camera samples to 4. When it was rendered, I opened the file in Photoshop (Adobe, 2020) and I exported it as a PNG file.

Body AO

Bones AO

Cloth1 AO

Cloth2 AO

Cloth3 AO

Eyes AO

Stripes AO

Headdress AO

Shoes AO

The last map that I baked was Colour ID Map. This is how I have done it: Firstly, I added coloured texture to the areas that I wanted to differentiate. Then I used Diffuse Map from Transfer Maps. Here is how it turned out: