Week 10

This week, my time was spent creating low poly models for the pot, the plant and the roots, working on the topology and getting the pieces UVed.

First of all, I used zremesher in zBrush to get low poly versions of my high poly meshes. Zremesher did a fairly good job in most cases but some areas, such as the teeth did not come out correctly. Now matter what I tried, I couldn't keep the detail of the teeth in the low poly mesh. So, instead, I imported what did come out fine (the leaves and vine), cut off the parts that weren't coming out correctly (the head) and then imported a high poly version of the head. I then used the high poly version as a template for retopologizing with the quad draw tool. This was a very tedious process and took almost 10 hours to complete.

I was also having problems with the quad draw tool. After a while, adding a new polygon began taking around 10-15 seconds to finish which made the tool virtually unusable. I did some searching on forums and found that this is caused by a buildup of construction history as well as a glitch with the tool where it will create additional shader nodes. As long as I deleted the construction history and reassigned the shader occasionally, it worked fine after that.

I then worked on UVs which, compared to the retopologizing, didn't take too long (around 2-3 hours). Here it is with a test material assigned.

Pot UV:

Plant UV:

Roots UV: