I spent this week creating some of the larger scale meshes I will use to decorate the environment with the intent to texture them next week. I used a mixture of sculpting, modelling and photogrammetry to generate these assets. I also experimented with using alternative software such as MeshLab and Instant Mesh to streamline my retopology process with these assets. Finally I created a simple spline tool to allow for me to procedurally generate chains and ropes within Unreal engine 4
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| Procedural rope and chain in UE4. |
Cacpcom license a line of small statues of monsters from the Monster Hunter series, I decided to capture these statues to generate base organic forms of complex monster designs I could then sculpt into to the mesh to achieve a high level of visual fidelity. In previous modules where I have used photogrammetry, I have simply created an exact copy of the subject matter, with this I want to try and transform the output into something more cohesive within a game environment and repurpose the subject.
Traditionally I have retopologized high-poly meshes manually in Maya using the quad-draw tool. However, this is a slow way of handling retopology especially with respect to more complex assets forms. With this in mind, I decided to investigate other software suits and test their effectiveness in my pipeline. The first tool I experimented with was MeshLab(http://www.meshlab.net/), an open-source mesh processing software, the suite of tools is rather robust and impressively effective. However, I found MeshLab to be very unstable and documentation was lacklustre leaving me to wonder through forums. For example, when exporting a mesh as a .obj certain setting, what can be switched on by default, will simply cause the entire program to crash. Certain functions can also cause MeshLab to crash if performed when the asset is visible. Once you learn about these you can navigate around them but they represent the rough nature of the software. Despite this, the results are impressive, the software's Quadric Edge Collapse, does a great job of preserving the assets form and gives me a good amount of control for an automated tool and handles incredibly high poly geometry with seeming ease. Unfortunately, it does triangulate the mesh and converting it back to quads is not easy to do. This makes the asset harder in some ways to work with afterwards if I need to and creating UV seams slower.
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| Screenshot of original(right) and retopologized (left) asset, as well as face and vertices counts (underneath). |
Instant Meshes(https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes) is a program from a SIGGRAPH paper on automatic retopology broadly it works similarly to Zremeasher within Zbrush and like Zremesher produces primarily quadded geometry. The process is divided up into 3 different stages: Orientation field generation, position field generation and mesh generation. Throughout each step, there are a number of tools to help improve the results but I found that the results from using these were mixed. While a quaded output was valuable I struggled to maintain a good form while using it and it doesn't hold many advantages over Zremesher especially when combined with the other tools you can use within in Zbrush to touch up the results.
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| Retopologized asset withing Instant Meshes. |