GAME-READY RETOPOLOGY

I’m finally getting close to finishing this character. The hardest part — the sculpt — is behind me. I’ve been working on this model since I first started learning ZBrush, so it’s taken about a year and a half to bring it to the stage it’s in now.

Color ID map — it helps separate parts of the model for easier texturing later in Substance Painter, allowing me to select areas by color instead of manually masking each piece. All you have to do is to color fill every separate object in a random color, just make sure the colors are ass different as possible from their neighbouring colors, this will make it easier for Substance Painter to mask without imperfections or blurs.

Personal projects can be a dangerous trap. This character took me a ridiculously long time to finish, but that’s because I kept reworking and polishing him, fixing things I wasn’t good at.. For a client, I’d probably have done it much faster, but here I really grew and got more comfortable with hard-surface elements and advanced fabric folds.

This is a prep stage for the retopology I import lowest subdivision levels from Zbrush and use them as a starting point for manualretopology, which saves a lot of time. There’s still cleanup and adjustments to do, reducing polycount for example, but it helps avoid the most tedious part of placing endless quads. I picked up this workflow from other artists who also use low Subdivs from ZBrush to speed up their retopo process. Some parts I had dynameshed, but I jsut used "retopolgy" tool from Maya.

The main focus now is retopology. If it’s done properly, it will make everything easier later — texturing, animation, and any future use of the character in a game or cinematic. This stage is a crucial step that needs to be carefully planned and executed. At the same time, it’s a nice, almost meditative process that lets you take a break after the intense sculpting phase.

Here’s a closer look at the head. Since the face won’t be animated, the retopology can be handled with a simple, clean edge flow — no need for complex loops around the eyes or mouth like on animated characters.

Like with any personal project, the hardest part is simply finding time to work on it. It tests your discipline — whether you can stay consistent and actually take it from start to finish. I’m glad that I finally reached the retopology stage. For me, the sculpting phase is always the toughest part; everything that comes after feels more like the fun part of the process.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding game-ready optimization or character creation pipeline in general!