W25 part 1 - character retopo attempt 2 (Success!!)

 

Since last time, I've managed to redo the topology on the owl character:

 

 This whole process took about 5 hours. Next time I do something like this (if I ever do this again) it should hopefully be faster and a little easier. Because you have to make the sculpt live to use quadraw, it kind of messed up when I went back to manually adjust some vertices, so I had to come out of quad draw, switch to vertex mode, make the sculpt not live anymore, and *then* I could make adjustments to the vertices or connect areas that quadraw just refused to do for some reason, then go back to quad draw to continue with the retopology. I had to do this often because quad draw just isn't that cooperative - needless to say the whole process was quite tedious. I wasn't trying to be too precise with quad draw as I was going to manually adjust the vertices once i'd covered the sculpt - I also kept the wings and tail as sperarate objects to hopefully they'll move better - the tail especially as it's kind of fused to the back of the sculpt and would look weird if I just left it like that.

I'm not looking forward to doing the texture on this guy as I'll now have to do the UVs - apparently in Zbrush you can texture things without doing UVs but every time I bring something in from Maya, there's random holes in the model that only dynamesh can cover, but that would then bring the poly count back up, so I can't really do that.