Sculpting and Retopo Workflow - Mastering Blender - page 215

Figure 3-71 From left to right: high-resolution sculpt, retopoed lower-poly mesh, and retopoed mesh with nor-
mal mapping
The Bottom Line
Get the most out of Blender's sculpting functionality. Blender's multires modeling and sculpting features
provide a powerful and versatile set of tools for 3D sculpting. When you finish each of the exercises that
follow, try showing your work on a thread in www.blenderartists.org/forum in the Focused Critique forum to
get suggestions on how you can improve it.
Master It Nothing is more important than practice for improving your skills at sculpting. Following the
guidelinesinthischapter,createatleastthreemoresculpturesofhumanheads.Trysculptingoldpeople,
women, and men. Try working from orthogonal references as described in this chapter and also try free-
hand from informal photographs. When you're comfortable with heads, experiment with working on
full-body sculptures. Note your impressions on the differences between the various subject matters and
how they are sculpted.
Use retopo to convert a sculpted form into a polygon model with correct edge loop geometry. Blender's
retopo feature enables you to create a new model whose shape is identical to another object, making it pos-
sible to recast a very high-polygon sculpted object into a lower-polygon model with elegant edge loop geo-
metry that can be easily deformed, animated, and rendered.
Master It Select themodel youaremosthappywithfromthepreviousexercise anduseretopotocreate
a lower-poly model of the same shape. Pay attention to edge loop geometry, and keep the density of the
mesh as low as you can while representing the underlying shape as accurately as possible.
Use normal map baking to capture finely sculpted detail for use on a low-poly model. Inorder to repres-
ent the detail of a very high-poly sculpted object, Blender enables you to bake the surface normal informa-
tion of the sculpted object onto a 2D texture called a normal map, which is then used as a UV texture on the
lower-poly model, yielding the illusion of a highly detailed surface.
Master It Follow the steps described in this chapter to bake a normal map from your sculpted object to
the retopologized model you created in the previous exercise.