Remesh - 3D Game Production Week 23

This week I worked on retopology for my main fireplace. I also created the extra assets in my scene that would populate it and provide an extra bit of believability to my scene. I faced some difficult decisions with the remesh.

My extra assets used the same workflow as the main fireplace. I decided to allocate a separate texture map for these since the shapes were too irregular to fit into the other maps. They also didn't really need that much texture space in the first place.

It was really fun experimenting with some organic sculpting like this bread. I used some new brushes that I hadn't used before. I also found a use for the indent brush that had ruined my bricks before. 

When I started the remeshing, I first thought that I could just use the decimation to get a low poly model easily since basically every piece of the fireplace was a rectangle. However this turned out not to work and I wasted an entire day in attempt to avoid two hours of work.

The automatic remesh didn't work at all, and gave me a lot of broken topology that was near impossible to properly unwrap. I decided to do it the normal way after seeing this.

I worked with the step build tool to create a low poly remesh that could work this way. However doing this way meant that the bricks wouldn't have any spaces between them that I was really relying on in order to create further visual interest. My bricks weren't lined up and some were rotated a little, which made it very difficult to remesh this way without losing my original vision.

After careful consideration, I scrapped that idea as well and instead used the low poly that I had made before for the main fireplace. For the bricks, I added individual bricks where the sculpted ones were by manually dragging them. This took time and I understand that this is not an efficient way of working. At the end my creative vision was preserved and I was able to do a much cleaner unwrap.

I'm glad I didn't try to unwrap this.