🎵It’s too late, topologize.🎶

Before any rigging can take place (or UV mapping for that matter), the high poly sculpt from Sam Proctor needs to be optimized.

I like to think of the lowpoly as a 3D papercraft version of the model, which in flattened view will act as the paper canvas on which we will print the texture, including the normal map.

For this we turned to the app Cozy Blanket, (always following the challenge to use the lowest possible energy requirement for the rig and cloud, here with a 5 watts power consumption on M1 ipad pro. No need to have a 40-100 watts laptop or 250 watt desktop running just a simple retopo task.

The app has some limitations, but managed to get 80% of the task done quickly, such that finishing it in Blender was easier than I expected. In particular, I did not have to do the face retopo in Blender, which sounds daunting. Having intuitive tools dedicated to each tasks still is worth the hassle of exporting. Thankfully I am fortunate to have found second hand mac mini that one wanted, and I airdrop stuff from the ipad to the mac mini, which synchronises to the NAS (network access storage), so it’s available on linux and windows laptops too.

Reducing the number of edges and polygons makes the character models render more efficiently, especially when we need up to 20-50 characters on screen.

We usually reduce from millions of polygons (1-10 million for nomad sculpts with polypaint vertex colors ) to 1-3 K polygons. K = 1 thousand. Modern game characters are 10K for stylized, up to 100K for hero characters in AAA. We’re going for minimum specs that should allow for 1K decimated versions of our 3K lowpoly characters to appear in a real crowd feeling. If we get this right, a game like this should be playable on tablets and nintendo switch too.

This is the lowpoly, with a baked normal map which makes the glossy part of the model react to the light as if they were more crip high-poly. It uses information from the sculpt and renders from vertex to pixel space. Much more efficient.

In games graphics, everything that can be baked, should be baked. Come to our next dev logs for a special baking episode!